Leeds United 2-1 West Ham: Getting it done — Square Ball 27/19/25

Sniffles in studs

Written by: Rob Conlon

I can’t have been the only Leeds fan walking to Elland Road on Friday night with a spring in my step. After wanting to throw everything in the bin following the painfully predictable defeat at Burnley, a big game against West Ham could have invited trepidation. Instead, being notified of Leeds’ starting XI prompted excitement. Bijol, Tanaka, Okafor in. Exactly what we wanted. At least if it went wrong we’d have something different to moan about.

Daniel Farke is still forming his third team in as many seasons as Leeds United manager, and Friday night was possibly as close as we’ve got to seeing what it was ‘meant’ to look like. Lucas Perri was joining Jaka Bijol back in the team, completing what we always thought was going to be Leeds’ first-choice defence and goalkeeper for the first time this season. Noah Okafor was restored to the wing to inject the high-calibre swagger this team needs. With Anton Stach struggling with fitness and form issues, Ao Tanaka’s selection was the luxury of choice and depth in midfield.

Farke must have learned enough at Leeds to know it was never going to last long. As half-time approached against West Ham, Gabriel Gudmundsson had already hurt his back and was replaced by James Justin, while Jack Harrison was being told to go warm up as Leeds’ coaching staff yelled at Okafor he only had to last two more minutes having recently recovered from injury himself. “We couldn’t afford to leave out everyone who had missed training sessions,” Farke said afterwards, referring to an illness that had swept through the squad through the week. If Leeds weren’t quite the walking wounded, they were still the sniffles in studs.

That meant Leeds needed to make life easier for themselves and avoid the silly misses, soft concessions and sluggish starts of recent weeks. In that sense, a West Ham team spooked by the mutiny on their own terraces were the perfect visitors. Barely three minutes were on the clock when Ethan Ampadu broke from midfield with Sean Longstaff alongside him. After the ball was worked wide to Jayden Bogle, Okafor’s header was saved and Brenden Aaronson snuffled up the rebound.

Following his miss at Burnley, it was the moment Aaronson needed and the type of goal he could and should be scoring more of given the qualities he possesses. Crucially, it was a collective attack that Leeds need more of, too. When Bogle looked up from the right, he had five players in the box to aim for. With the defence preoccupied by Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Okafor didn’t even have to jump to win the header and Aaronson had the room to put Leeds 1-0 up. Calvert-Lewin can’t do it all by himself, but he can make things a lot easier for those around him as long as they’re close enough.

Not having to jump to score from a header became a theme of the night. A backheel from Okafor allowed Gudmundsson to win a corner, and from Longstaff’s delivery Lucas Paqueta watched Joe Rodon run in front of him to nod in Leeds’ second. Having scored three goals in his first six years as a professional footballer, Rodon has now scored three goals in a month for club and country and looked like he couldn’t quite believe how simple it can be all along. Meanwhile, the away end was already contemplating their journeys home.

With the buffer of early goals, the remainder of the first half was entertainingly back and forth. Jarrod Bowen tested Perri with an overhead kick, Tomáš Souček headed wide and Paqueta had a goal ruled out for offside after a lengthy VAR check in which everyone knew what was going on apart from everyone inside the stadium. Despite West Ham’s threat, Leeds remained on the front foot. Tanaka started a nice move by scrapping for possession and turning in his own half before ending it with a wild hit over the bar from the edge of the box that was still met with a huge bellow of his name. Ampadu, with a taste for breaking forward after his role in Aaronson’s opener, dribbled from his own half only to get confused by a sight of goal, switching onto his left foot and passing an endearingly terrible shot wide. Okafor almost showed him how it’s done after Rodon surged forward and sent him into the box, twisting his full-back to bend the ball narrowly past the far post. Jayden Bogle forced a save after overlapping into the box.

It needed to be an eventful half because it lasted so long due to the VAR check, Gudmundsson’s injury and West Ham teenager Oliver Scarles going off sucking gas and air with his arm in a makeshift sling. I’d never heard of Scarles, but his substitution summed up the mess West Ham have got themselves into. He’s a left-back, starting at right wing-back, ultimately replaced by a striker in Callum Wilson after Nuno Espirito Santo went without a recognised centre-forward in his initial XI. I presumed Nuno was injecting some youthful spirit into his side with Scarles and midfielder Andy Irving, who I’d equally never heard of. Turns out he’s 25, and joined West Ham following spells in the German third division and Austrian Bundesliga. If the Premier League is supposedly the best league in the world, then random bollocks like that is the kind of thing that makes me think Leeds belong here after all.

The worry for Farke was the question of how long Leeds could keep it up. The fear for fans was that, with Okafor’s withdrawal at the interval, Leeds were returning to the undynamic duo of Aaronson and Jack Harrison who were so maligned at Burnley. Okafor’s skill on one wing gives Leeds a much better balance if there’s going to be a watercarrier on the other. Yet without Okafor’s thrust, Aaronson let Harrison carry the water and instead injected his own enterprise into the game. It helped that El Hadji Malick Diouf might be the only left-back in the league to fall for Aaronson’s buffering, but it still required Aaronson to display a verve we haven’t seen since his first couple of months as a Premier League player three years ago. Ten minutes after the break, he got the ball in his own half and set off towards goal, beating three players along the way, only for his Goal of the Season attempt to deflect off a defender and onto the bar. If it wasn’t Aaronson’s best performance in a Leeds shirt, it wasn’t far off.

Alongside Calvert-Lewin hanging in the air to win headers and scrapping with centre-backs, Aaronson’s dribbling was Leeds’ most productive means of alleviating pressure in the second half as the players visibly flagged. Bijol was alert in making an excellently-timed tackle, stealing the ball away from Wilson as the striker shaped to shoot. At the other end of the pitch, Calvert-Lewin’s legs stopped working almost out of exhaustion just as Aaronson swung in a low cross, the ball ultimately hitting United’s number 9 and deflecting wide as he lay on the ground.

With Farke holding subs back after two early changes, Leeds were happy to play the Burnley role of sitting deeper and absorbing pressure from a relatively toothless team, even as they were gasping for air. Mateus Fernandes’ free header while standing in between Rodon, Bijol and Ampadu will need ironing out, but Leeds at least held out for long enough to make sure it was nothing more than a consolation.

Instead, it made a welcome change for the opposition, rather than Leeds, to be ruing what they will no doubt consider a self-inflicted defeat. For all there have been times, like Burnley, when fans have needed to vent, it was another example of a trait that Farke has instilled in Leeds ever since his first season in charge ended with a typical Wembley no-show. Often when there has been cause to panic or doubt, Leeds have delivered a much-needed dose of reassurance with perfect timing. Was it pretty? No, but after a few weeks of trying to take heart from stats rather than scorelines, Leeds simply needed to get the job done.

As his knackered teammates celebrated a big win at full-time, late sub Lukas Nmecha was closing down goalkeeper Alphonse Areola as the whistle was blown. Rather than stop, Nmecha kept sprinting, keeping the pressure on as if desperate to make sure. At the end of a week in which everyone felt sick, he seemed happy enough to keep running for the rest of the night. It’s a wonder how much better three points can make you feel.