Manchester United 5-1 Leeds United: What Are We Doing? - The Square Ball 15/8/21

NOT THAT!

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

What are Leeds United without momentum? A Premier League football club, like we wanted for sixteen years, but not exactly like we wanted. Because we never wanted to be just another Premier League football club. Once you’re there, though, what else is there to be?

Leeds United has to be extra. It’s not a club that does peace. To talk of stasis in the 2010s when we always finished 15th in the Championship isn’t accurate because the club’s exceptionalism was consistently expressed through havoc. And we always wanted out — there was always promotion to aim for, or wish for, as became Massimo Cellino’s preference. Once Marcelo Bielsa overcame a decade’s inertia, Leeds United was a steamroller with a brick on the gas. It smashed through the Derby play-off defeat as if it was hardly there. It steamed right through a pandemic. It obliterated expectations by barrelling up the Premier League to 9th.

It was unexpected but it was also right, for Leeds United. The expectations United have exceeded in the last three seasons were all other people’s. Leeds fans got excitement, but not only that, they got their swagger back. Promotion back to the Premier League, in the end, was just something we’d been demanding for sixteen years. It wasn’t a favour to us, it was like having stolen jewellery returned. There was more to the last three years than promotion because technically, let’s face it, Neil Warnock could have done that — he’d done it before and he loves to talk about it. But he would never have done it in this style, and that has been the difference. For three years, at all times, Leeds United have been proving something to someone, and that has been special, especially when we’ve been proving it to everyone. Beating Manchester City proved something, Derby County’s self-destruction is proving something, even Ben White’s abject debut in an Arsenal shirt on Friday night got a few knowing smiles from Leeds fans who never saw him so bad for Leeds. It has been an exhilarating three years not only because we got our Premier League status back, but because we got our club back, and our club is nothing like theirs. It’s better, in all the ways that matter.

I suppose, technically, what occurs on the pitch during ninety minutes of football on the opening day at Old Trafford matters, when it comes to comparing football clubs. But when it comes to being in the Premier League it actually doesn’t much, and here’s where a kind of second season syndrome is kicking in for Leeds. We won’t be relegated. We won’t win the title. We probably won’t qualify for Europe. We want that, but it feels distant, not so much due to the squad but an unwritten law about how qualifying for Europe isn’t supposed to be so easy for promoted teams. There’s a probation to go through first. Another top half finish would be good, staying in the division is top priority, better than last year would be nice but it’s not essential. The aims, now, are all over the bloody place. What was simple was promotion and staying up and annoying people. Those ambitions generated their own momentum and gave Leeds ample opportunity to piss people off. But what are we even doing now?

Not coping with Bruno Fernandes or Paul Pogba, there’s one thing. And the solution to that is pretty simple, because last season at Elland Road Kalvin Phillips didn’t let Fernandes have a touch, and Pogba couldn’t do anything when he came on for the last fifteen minutes, so we can just pick Kalvin in the team and we’ll be a lot better. Those two were kept reasonably quiet in the first half this time, until Pogba seized on chaos after a clearance from Illan Meslier, and Fernandes played Robin Koch like he was a centre-back, which he is. It’s not only Bielsa who thinks Koch can be a midfielder, the German national team believe in it too, but as Fernandes strolled away from him Koch was looking upfield as if he was the last one back with the whole game in front of him, and was oblivious to the spaces opening up behind him. Phillips has the 360 degree vision of a lifelong midfielder, used to seeing everything. Koch needs to see Fernandes to know what he’s up to, and as Fernandes was putting in his second and third after half-time, Koch was playing blindfolded. After the match, Bielsa wouldn’t pick on individuals. “I liked how he played,” he said about Koch. “I thought he was a dynamic player, he was present. He was willing and committed and made lots of [defensive] efforts.” It sounds Bielsish for ‘I can’t fault his effort.’

The second half was when it all went wrong because Pogba started playing everybody in, not just Fernandes but Mason Greenwood and Fred, and Victor Lindelof helped out with a long pass giving Fernandes an emphatic hat-trick. Pogba at his best is a devastating opponent because he can destroy teams from anywhere, he’ll have the ball deep in his own half and with one pass he’s creating danger bloody miles away from where everyone else thought the action was. Leeds United’s plan for reading his intentions and counteracting them seemed to be running around in lots of different directions so that even they didn’t know where the space was. Pogba did. Usually it was down the side where Raphinha wasn’t helping Luke Ayling to protect Struijk, while half-time substitute Junior Firpo watched from the other wing and wondered. But then there was the one down his side as well. Leeds weren’t being carved open minute after minute the way they go after teams themselves, when they camp in the final third and play Buckaroo with the goalmouth. Instead their opponents here cut them up with a lazy sort of precision, never needing to do too much, always finding just the space and finish they needed when they got through.

It ended 5-1 because just after half-time Luke Ayling equalised with a great goal and a great moment. Leeds will need more of this. Not necessarily the shot, a big humdinger when Ayling took a square ball and trepanned it into the top corner. But the leadership. United had lacked that in the first half, and it’s what Ayling was trying to provide by doing something positive, taking a decisive action, shouldering some responsibility for getting Leeds into the game. That the ball flew in, that Ayling became so entwined with Stuart Dallas in the celebrations the cameras had to cut away before the watershed, and that he was laughing his head off before the game restarted while the returning fans in the away end felt like all Old Trafford belonged to them, was almost an unexpected bonus. It wasn’t the only point Ayling was trying to make when he took the shot on. But soon he was making another point, to everyone around him and mentally to himself, as their opponents quickly and simply went back in front.

Because it ended 5-1 the idea is that Ayling’s brilliant goal doesn’t matter, but I think that’s the wrong way round. Leeds won’t go up and Leeds won’t go down, so in a sporting sense winning 5-1 or losing 10-0 were all pretty much the same here. We might as well treasure the goal, a great thing done with a football that was a lot of fun to see. Getting into the Champions League is pretty much impossible for a club in its second season in the Premier League, while we know from last season’s experience that we can embarrass ourselves heavily at Old Trafford and still end up with only one win less than Chelsea in 4th. There’s a reason why people say the Championship play-off final is the most expensive game in football: getting into the Premier League is a life’s work, but once you’re there and comfortable, the stakes are much reduced. Leeds would meet most of their supporters’ expectations by finishing anywhere between 7th and 15th this season, while keeping their stadium redevelopment and commercial growth projects on schedule. What they won’t do that way is meet their supporters’ impatience for those projects to happen, or satisfy the ambition that hasn’t been sated by the last three years of hungry fulfilment, but grown beyond what a mid-table club can deliver. Losing this game heavily but realising in the long run it doesn’t matter, and that drastic changes won’t be needed in its wake to do what Leeds need to do this season, is a taste of what we’re up against this year: the Premier League, where your ambitions are smashed against the rocks yet you don’t feel a thing.

Except for wounded pride, and that’s a target to inspire Leeds to better than the mill-run this season. Don’t let this be the norm. Don’t let Raphinha’s blue moods take the place of pride, either. Winning enough games to stay up is going to be the easy part this season. With that as a given, don’t relax, and don’t let anyone make fools of you. After this time, anyway.