Norwich City 1-2 Leeds United: Knowing what they’re doing - The Square Ball 1/11/21

CRACKING ON

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

The game was in its last ten minutes and Norwich City were turning from tough to tired to tetchy. Leeds United had an attacking free-kick on the left, presided over by Raphinha. Adam Forshaw made a run to the wing, taking his marker with him, and that revealed Rodrigo, the target of Raphinha’s pass. Rodrigo pinged the ball straight back where it came from, but either he put too much on it or Raphinha’s touch let him down. Maybe Raphinha caught himself out, thinking a lay-off to Jackie Harrison might work. Either way, the best player on the pitch let the ball get away from him, Norwich hit it wide to their threatening right-back, Max Aarons, and the Canaries were breaking towards an undeserved 2-2.

What a solid tackle Stuart Dallas made to stop him, timing and sliding, putting ball and man out of play and out of danger. A third Leeds goal would have been valuable at this stage of the game. Security against a second equaliser and a chance to breathe and reset were a decent alternative. Leeds did a lot like this all game. The good plan thought up, the execution beginning, an infinitesimal failure, a frantic rescue. A player gazing upfield wondering if there will come a time when a switch flicks the game back to being easy.

The first half was dire and nervous. More than a quarter of all passes by both teams missed. Thirty tackles were tried, eighteen free-kicks were given. At their best Leeds United could do what Chelsea did to Norwich City last weekend, but that knowledge only seemed to add pressure onto players who know they’re far from their best lately. Even a goal couldn’t calm them down. One of those came ten minutes into a second half that wasn’t much better, Raphinha not so much taking Norwich on himself as determined not to waste a good move started by Pascal Struijk, a good pass from Dan James, by letting the ball out of his control. The chance was there to dribble and shoot and he took it. Then Jamie Shackleton spurned a chance to put a ball to safety and from the resultant corner Norwich headed an equaliser, two minutes after going behind. The game had gone from stale to topsy-turvy, ‘unbalanced’ in Marcelo Bielsa’s favoured phrase, and Leeds took advantage, a good pass by Kalvin Phillips putting Rodrigo into the same area as Raphinha, a bit further out, not so many players to beat, hitting a shot good enough to deceive Tim Krul and put Leeds definitively back in front. Most of the decent play happened in those four minutes. It was a good result for Leeds but it was not an easy game to watch, because it’s never easy to watch people struggling. It must be worse to play through, to be the ones struggling.

Stuart Dallas talked a bit about struggling last week. Fans have been asking about a lot of Leeds players this season, what’s up with ’em? And here was a reply from one: the death of a close friend combined with a bout of Covid-19 that meant Dallas had to quarantine alone while he grieved, rather than feel comfort among loved ones, or even attend the funeral. It was a footballer’s football interview, so Dallas used the official footballer’s ‘not an excuse’ tone and phrasing, because it’s a sin in football to ‘make excuses’ even when they’re really very good explanations. He did say a lack of energy post-Covid has affected his game, but the emotional and mental impacts were dusted away behind the euphemisms people use when they’re in pain to make other people feel better: it was challenging, it was tough, he just had to crack on. It’s left up to us and our empathetic imaginations to bridge the gap from just cracking on to an idea of the reality: of Stuart locked in a hotel room, forbidden close contact, feeling the fever and short breath of Covid symptoms or, if asymptomatic, the fear of them; he’s sending texts and making calls to lifelong loved ones distraught by the tragic early death of another of them, angry that he can’t swap being on the phone for being there, and when the tiring hours of remotely sharing grief are over, all that’s left is to extinguish the light and live with his thoughts for as long as it takes until sleep. The next day the same, for a week or ten days, four relentless walls, however many stages of grief a person can get through in that place in that time. Perhaps none. “In football you don’t get time to grieve,” Stuart said, and Covid denied him the choice anyway. “I’ll just crack on, and maybe look back on it in years to come that it was maybe the wrong thing to do.” Decision making is key in football. Stuart Dallas has been and is dealing with implications bigger than the wrong choice of pass on a counter attack. “For me at the minute, I feel it’s the right thing, to not use anything as an excuse.” He can’t feel sure. Who could? It’s chastening to think we’ve been watching someone doing something they might one day regret, because they want to make us happy. “We’re here to do a job,” he said. “I represent a lot of people when I play for this football club and I don’t want to let anybody down, so it’s important that I continue to crack on and play through it.” At least the Leeds fans at Carrow Road, now knowing, sang their appreciation.

Daniel James lost his dad a little over two years ago. Kalvin Phillips’ Granny Val died in February. It was Stuart Dallas who grabbed a shirt after scoring against Southampton to show the squad’s support for Kalvin. In June Dallas dedicated his three end of season awards to his grandad, saying only that he was “going through a tough time.” Adam Forshaw swapped two years of his career for two years of pain and the fear his son would only know him as a footballer from videos: a different kind of loss, grieving an idea of fatherhood. “Within my possibilities,” Marcelo Bielsa said about his players after beating Norwich, “I try to go with them through the unstable moments of being a human being.” That’s the course this blog is now headed on, about how amid the murderball and the screaming ¡carajo! and the “Again! Again! Move, Tyler!”, there’s no better coach to play for when you’re going through being a human than Marcelo Bielsa.

The singularity of his tactical approach, his rejection of public criticism of his players, his preference for a small squad of satisfied people, the simplicity of his footballing ideals, the training that replicates game situations, the focus on positive performances during periods of bad results. The aim of rehearsing football until the motions are second nature and creativity can flourish means a player like Raphinha can add delirious inventions and another like Stuart Dallas can dig deep into the basics. After ten dislocating days of grief and isolation, anybody would be nervous about returning to the shifting ground of expectations placed on them at work, but what better environment than the same eighteen lads at Thorp Arch, and Bielsa’s coaches asking only that you try to do what you did so well before. Once you’ve mastered the game as Bielsa sees it, all he’ll ever ask of you is returning to that level.

“The doubt in the footballer is linked with the possibility of making a mistake,” he said this weekend. As far as Bielsa can, he minimises the impact of doubt. “When you go resolving situations that are slightly above what you think you are capable of, it increases self-esteem, and this is a process the players know happens.” There’s little to fear in making a comeback when a few weeks ago you were great at this, and you know that doing it again will make you play better. That applies to all Bielsa’s players this season. They’re not playing well, but we can see them trying to come back, trying to do the things they’ve done well before. Bielsa isn’t compounding their problems by asking them to do unfamiliar things: even Harrison or James, unusually playing at centre-forward, have done that before. “What really allows you to overcome the limits is the mental strength to put at play what you possess,” he said a few weeks ago, “and no-one manages a maximum expression if they’re not convinced of what they’re doing.” Other words for ‘convinced’ are sure and confident, and no matter what state of mind his players are in, they can be sure about what will happen in training every day, confident that Bielsa will not chuck any curve balls or make unexpected demands. There’s no more convincing argument for Leeds than the success they’ve had already, and no easier plan to carry out than the steps that achieved it before. If you can do something once you can do something twice, a powerful thought amid mental fog.

I’m sure Daniel Farke cares for his Norwich players as much as any coach does, but it doesn’t look like he’s mastered this part of management. I don’t know what could save Norwich from relegation, but after failing last time, Farke seems to be just leaving them to it. They have Teemu Pukki up front but without Emi Buendia they don’t know what to do about it. They kept arriving in United’s half and running out of ideas, stumped. They succeeded with 46 of 111 attempted passes in the attacking third, but only two of eleven they put into the penalty area did anything. Norwich aren’t alone in this; Ole Solskjaer fistpumped his way into another week of employment thanks to individual skill masking the same planless mess that disintegrated last week against better opposition than Spurs. Nobody playing for or coaching Tottenham seems to know what Harry Kane or anyone is supposed to be doing at any given moment. I watched Aston Villa go 2-0 up against Wolves the other week, and start playing as if they’d never rehearsed it. They lost 3-2. Back in the Championship, Scottie Parker once tried to form a critique of Leeds’ game plans: “they’re the most structural and patterned team … the movements Leeds make are very scripted.” What that comes down to is that Leeds’ players know what they’re doing, and that helps them, even when they’re doing it badly. I suspect Norwich City’s players would gladly swap.

Those scripts also got Leeds promoted, although not without pain. Comparisons of United’s bad times under Bielsa somehow gloss over the end of his first season, skipping straight to the play-off semi-final second leg that was such a shock that the games condemning Leeds to 3rd in the first place — won three, drew one, lost five, including winning positions ludicrously lost and players sobbing on the pitch with two games left — became an amnesiac blur. It wasn’t only the second half of the second leg that had Bielsa packing for Rosario, assuming he wouldn’t be asked to stay, but the hobbled end to the league season. Bielsa did stay, and then he had to prove the players could be helped out of their play-off grief, that he could lift them from mourning their Premier League selves into resurrecting them. They didn’t make it look easy but they never looked lost, and in their worst moment — the two wins in ten culminating in disorienting defeat at Forest — Bielsa showed them a video of that defeat and highlighted every positive quality, every good thing they’d unthinkingly done right because, beneath the emotion and the stress, they knew what they were doing. They still do, and that’s a relief.