The eeriest silence, the loudest explosion - The Square Ball 21/10/21
LOUD & QUIET
Written by Rob Conlon
Sure, it’s nothing to celebrate, but for all the talk about
where Leeds United’s 1-0 defeat at Southampton ranks among the poorest
performances under Marcelo Bielsa, it doesn’t take much looking back to find a
day of similar distress.
Ignoring defeats to clubs whose budgets could buy them fifty
Lewis O’Briens, when Leeds visited the south coast thirteen Premier League
games ago, returning defeated after barely giving the goalkeeper a shot to
save, fans were asking if it was the worst we’d played in the Bielsa era.
Brighton were the hosts, winning 2-0, a comprehensive beating the scoreline did
not do justice. Leeds had two shots on target and Patrick Bamford played like a
proto-Rodrigo, subbed off after just fifteen touches in an hour. Raphinha and
Kalvin Phillips were both missing from the line-up, and it was impossible to
envisage how we could ever win a game without them both.
We didn’t have to wait long for an answer. A week later,
Tottenham came to Elland Road trying to justify their European Super League
delusions. Phillips and Raphinha were now fit enough to play, but Bielsa named
the same limp eleven anyway, much to the dismay of Leeds Twitter. Bielsa knew
they had performed below levels they were capable of. He wanted them to prove
they hadn’t become bad players overnight, which doesn’t mean they won’t
occasionally play badly.
Leeds proved their manager right, winning 3-1 as the old
muscle memory of Bielsaball returned. Robin Koch played as a holding
midfielder, Stuart Dallas was on the wing, Tyler Roberts was the number 10. It
was fine. Leeds were already winning 2-1 when Raphinha came on and set Rodrigo
up to score the third. Phillips stayed on the bench until the 90th minute.
Covering the game in the absence of Phil Hay, The Athletic’s George Caulkin was
evangelical about what he witnessed from the same set of players we wanted
throwing in the bin seven days earlier. ‘Leeds United have two front feet,’ he
wrote. ‘They do not compromise and there is no respite and when plan, identity,
fitness and form all slot together, there is no more exhilarating or exhausting
sight.’
There is no point pretending Saturday’s defeat at
Southampton was full of promise and optimism. Likewise, there is no need to
think those players will always be as bad as they were at St Mary’s. The
turnaround may not even have to be as drastic to beat Wolves at Elland Road in
Leeds’ next fixture, particularly if Bielsa decides to restore Raphinha and
Phillips to the team.
One intriguing difference to help us gauge how this squad
has evolved between Premier League campaigns will be the presence of a crowd.
Leeds were able to tear into Tottenham with clear heads and only the sound of
Bielsa’s barks in their ears. They will be playing against Wolves in front of a
sold-out Elland Road, knowing they wasted the release of tension that came from
beating Watford. In a recent interview with La Media Inglesa, Victor Orta
touched upon crowd psychology in Leeds. “Here the fans don’t whistle, they
murmur, which is worse,” he said.
Elland Road will be rocking come kick-off against Wolves,
and if Leeds start as quickly as they did against Tottenham in May it will stay
that way. Part of me wants to see how our players react if they don’t make an
early breakthrough and the stadium becomes a collective of murmurs. ‘Leeds do
not play like silence,’ Caulkin wrote after the win over Spurs. ‘They play like
the boom of cannon fire.’ But sometimes the loudest explosions come right after
the eeriest silences.