Crystal Palace 0-0 Leeds United: Optimising - The Square Ball 26/4/22

OR OPTIMISTIC

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

This just wasn’t quite it though, Leeds. A point is valuable in any relegation battle but, with harder games coming on paper, we really wanted three now. A second successive clean sheet is a very rare commodity this season, but the last one came with three goals at the other end, this time, none. The defensive solidity could be what keeps us up, but Leeds looked aimless in the other two-thirds of the field, and that could be what sends us down. Really, we just wanted to see something a bit hopeful at Selhurst Park on Monday night. We still have plenty of reasons to actually be hopeful, it’s just hard to remember them while watching a game like this. We still look better than Everton. But I wanted us to look loads better than Everton, not just a bit.

This could sound like ingratitude when Leeds are five games unbeaten — three of them wins — but it’s not. It’s desperation. A draw with Palace should represent par, an away point from a strong mid-table Premier League side should be something with which to mark our progress, if only we were mid-table too. But that’s the paradox of being at the bottom: the worse you’re doing, the better you have to play to improve. The fewer wins you have, the more you need — and the more you’re expected to produce. To go from losing to drawing is improvement, but the league position — and Burnley’s rise — keeps saying improve more, improve faster, before it’s too late.

It’s not surprising that Leeds’ improvements look more like awkward lurches. The idea right now doesn’t seem to be about getting the players playing ‘good’ football. When Jesse Marsch arrived he talked about relieving stress, and a valid way of achieving that is to take high levels of precision out of the game plans and tell players to hit areas and not worry about finding feet. We’ve all felt Jackie Harrison’s anguish when a high-speed swivel on the byline and a cut-back into the six yard box misses Dan James’ toe by inches, or seen Stuart Dallas and Mateusz Klich’s frustration when a quick one-two in a tight area doesn’t quite come off. Compare that to the simple joy of Rodrigo’s goal at Watford, when Sam Greenwood jabbed a ball generally forward and Watford’s defenders panicked under pressure. He was trying it again when he came on at Palace: not looking for the precise pass, but trying to send something forward that’s near enough, that can be chased and turned into something. Leeds played extraordinary football for three years, then hit the buffers; Marsch is letting the players unwind from the tension and be ordinary again, trusting that will be good enough.

The downside of optimising for the average, though, is that it blunts some of the players who could still be capable of more extraordinary things. Raphinha’s creativity is a sad thing now, lonely in a heap on the touchline where he no longer goes. I wish it was possible, in Marsch’s narrow system, to just let Raphinha off the hook to roam where he wants and make some of the old good things happen again. But the innovation now seems to be putting Raphinha on long throws. He can’t dazzle us with his magical feet when he’s off the pitch with the ball in his hands.

But this is where Marsch and his years of RB training are taking Leeds in the search for results. The Red Bull model is about buying players young ‘n’ cheap, and getting the most from them before they’re fully developed and sold on. By necessity the RB clubs never have the best players at their best; they get Erling Haaland for a while, but years before his peak. So the style of play has to be optimised for getting results from players while they struggle, try to learn and improve, and in some cases just stay pretty bad. That’s why so much of the emphasis of the ‘gegenpressing’ that RB made popular is about seizing on mistakes and catching the other team out — it doesn’t need patient build up that might be beyond the team’s technical level, it needs quick reactions in moments when spaces and chances open up. That’s easy to train: win the ball high and aim it to the penalty spot. It’s ideal for a team of players being developed to sell, and ideal for a team struggling to play well.

Listening to Mateusz Klich’s interview on BBC Radio Leeds last week, I really enjoyed how simple he made the change of tactics under Marsch. “Yeah, I play a bit different,” he said, “a bit more behind and more like a holding midfielder instead of running around everywhere that I wanted to.” I loved that breakdown: now, holding midfielder; before, running around everywhere. Football made easy. “We have all played that,” he went on, talking about zonal marking, “even in the national team I don’t play man to man, I play zonal as well. So it’s not really difficult. It’s more about just, ‘switch’, in the head.”

It intrigued me because it sounded opposite to something Marcelo Bielsa had said, when asked if he would ever change his system, about how difficult that was. I put their different views down to the same source of professional mystique, filtered through different personalities: none of us really understands what work on a training pitch is like, so while Bielsa makes it sound more difficult than it really is, Klich makes it sound easier than it really is. But during the Palace game, after Klich was arguing tactics with Marsch on the sidelines and taken off at half-time, I thought again about Bielsa’s take. “To not maintain your philosophy of play, and abandon the main themes that sustain it, that’s easy,” he said. “But what’s difficult is to construct a new philosophy to substitute it and know that it resolves the next game.”

Marsch would agree with that. He has emphasised the simplicity of the tactical ‘topics’ he has been working on with the players, because he knows that in the short weeks between matches he can’t tell them everything. He has to be selective, get the most bang for his buck from what video sessions they’ll sit through, choosing simple new ideas they can take onboard mid-season. And watching Leeds against Palace, I would agree with it too. It might be easy for Klich and the players to flick the switch from man-marking to zonal, to stop doing the old themes. But it’s looking much, much harder for them to get as good at doing the new style as they were at doing the old style.

Back when the old style worked, that is. This is where so much of the redundant online heat comparing Bielsa and Marsch misses the point. The question right now isn’t about which style is better, it’s about what could have been achieved more quickly: getting the players back to playing Bielsa’s style at its best, or getting the players up to playing Marsch’s style instead. We couldn’t carry on as we were, so which path was going to be the quickest away from relegation: towards what we knew, or towards something new?

Leeds chose the new path, but the underlying difficulty is still the same. Players who were botching Bielsa’s ball were not suddenly going to master Marsch’s, because they’re just not up to mastering much right now. Give them any type of football to play and Leeds will probably do it quite badly, because that’s what being out of form does. Comparisons are pointless because the players just aren’t doing a good job of anything this season.

In the meantime, they’re getting better at getting clean sheets, and if this one came ugly, so be it. Wilfried Zaha, in between feuding with Luke Ayling, had Palace’s two best chances at once: a near post shot blocked by Illan Meslier’s legs, and the rebound the same. Otherwise, even if it needed frantic blocks at times and was helped by awkward crosses meeting misplaced headers, Leeds didn’t let them get easy shots. If it was concerning how, after riling Palace up off the ball and taking off Dan James, then Rodrigo, Leeds retreated into all-out defence for twenty closing minutes that passed like years, it was noticeable that the shots were coming from further away, that dogged effort to protect the point was paying off.

A point is usually what Palace offer. They lead the league in draws this season — fourteen — and their goal difference is plus two. The return fixture was tight at Elland Road, settled by Raphinha’s 94th minute penalty, so in the end we can say we went to Selhurst Park and got what most teams got. The worry is, with only one point for that, about getting what most teams get from Manchester City on Saturday. It’s a question of optimisation and optimism, if one can come from the other. I actually, nonsensically, in my bones, feel like we’ll beat Manchester City. But I didn’t see anything last night to pull that eerie premonition into reality.