Watford 0-3 Leeds United: You’ve got to win - The Square Ball 10/4/22

CONFIDENCE IS A PREFERENCE

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

An imaginary version of this game gave either Leeds United or Watford — probably, in most Leeds fans’ bitter experience, Watford — the poise and grace of the ’74 Netherlands team or Leeds circa 2020, and had them demolishing their opponent 7-0 or 8-0, stretching elegantly towards Premier League safety while the other team cowered in the mud.

Not so. Leeds and Watford played, as they have this season, not very well. Luke Ayling wrote on Instagram, ‘All about the points’, Liam Cooper replied, ‘Ohhhh we will take it BillyBoy’, and that’s right. This spring might not bring vintage games, but these might be happy days. The last time Leeds won a game 3-0 was against Crewe in August, and even that didn’t come easy. The result at Vicarage Road looks very, very pretty in the classified results. You can worry too much about how it was achieved.

The answer is beyond quality, or a lack of it. This was an extended slow jam remix of the hectic wins over Norwich and Wolves, matches won by relying on character to lead where skill didn’t want to go. Nerves got jangled — Ismaila Sarr blazing a big chance wide as Leeds gave Watford chances to equalise at 1-0 — then United settled it at the end. It took a Watford mistake to make the second goal happen, but that’s not our problem.

The story of Leeds’ revival is about the players finding a way, and in the nicest sense new manager Jesse Marsch has been a bystander to that. A better word might be enabler, and I think he might be quite pleased to hear it said. Asked about the fans singing his name at Vicarage Road, Marsch said, “So much of my emphasis is about the team and about us as a group, and what we’re about, and how we’re going to achieve things together. And any time that it draws attention to me, I don’t necessarily like it.” The emphasis was put into words at his first press conference, when he said:

“I love tactics and I love football. But I really love working with young men, and helping them understand how to continue to improve and be the best version of themselves.”

And the one time Leeds had a real go at implementing his tactics, against Aston Villa, the match was a disaster. Success has come to Leeds in the moments at the end of the game against Norwich, in the last half-hour at Wolves, in most of the game at Watford, when the events on the field have been taken out of the hands of anybody in the technical areas and fate has been held in the hands, or the heads and feet, of the players.

When Marsch arrived, he said he likes to ask players what sort of training drills they want to do and build their ideas in, and I thought he was lucky he wasn’t asking those questions back in summer 2018. Maybe this is the evolution from Marcelo Bielsa, taking players whose game was transformed by his coaching, and listening to their experienced adaptations of his ideas. Adam Forshaw has said, since early after Bielsa arrived, that he has kept notebooks about everything he was learning, but would Bielsa have welcomed a twenty minute pre-match chat like Adam had with Jesse in Watford? “That conversation was just about our team, how we’re doing, where we’re going and what our goals are, how to get there,” said Marsch. The future belongs to Forshaw and the players. Marsch is here to heed them, empower them and make sure his plans help them; a facilitator.

At this stage that means standing back and letting them dig themselves out. “I had [Cooper] speak to the team afterwards, I haven’t had a better captain in the entire time I’ve been a coach,” said Marsch, putting himself in the background and giving Skipdogg charge. Letting the players off their leash comes with a risk, because even when they’re given wide open fields to run around in, they look like they don’t trust what’s out there. The players are miles away from being the best versions of themselves, and that’s why so many passes are going astray, why only one Diego Llorente ball forward in ten meets its target, why for the second match in a row Leeds went pale after going ahead. A good start was given up so Watford could start playing, but then Raphinha was certain in a moment of confusion that he should smack the ball inside the near post and give Leeds the lead after twenty minutes. So he did that. Then came deep breaths and lots of effort until, with fifteen minutes to go, two Watford defenders passed to neither of each other and Rodrigo took the ball around Ben Foster with glee.

All this doesn’t mean Marsch’s tactical ideas are completely absent. He provides the stage for these deep, characterful performances to happen. A tactical problem Leeds are having is that, by ‘accelerating the coaching transition’, in Angus Kinnear’s phrase, they’ve gone a little too soon, implementing the headline part of the plan before they can put the component parts in place. Or to put it another way, it was fine not to have very many midfielders when Bielsa was here, because he didn’t have the team doing much in that area anyway. Now that Marsch is throwing double-sixes in there, without Kalvin Phillips starting, the lack of authority or creativity is giving teams the chance to dominate. Even Watford.

The other side of this is that, with Cooper back and man marking deleted, the defence can withstand the pressure the midfield’s shortcomings create. Bielsa’s football was the making of Cooper, but since coming back into the side he’s been applying all he learned while going back to the way he used to play in the bad before times. He anticipated danger, won interceptions, tackles, blocks. Cooper was the first to pivot to Bielsa’s ideas when he came, now he looks first to rise to what Marsch wants. Alongside him, Llorente was inconsistent: sometimes tackling with all the trimmings, other times just… I don’t even know what. Either side of them, Ayling continues to walk his form like a tightrope, while Stuart Dallas looks like he’s being dragged along by one, tied to the winger he’s chasing. And yet none of this turned into big chances for Illan Meslier to deal with. Even giving Watford all the free-kicks Newcastle and Southampton profited from against us didn’t give our keeper, still sore from Wolves, anything to trouble his bones.

A certain amount has to be put down to Watford’s incompetence, but that’s the nature of the game, even in the Premier League. Earlier in the day I watched Everton beating Manchester United, and although Leeds were pretty bad at Watford, I’d fancy the same performance to beat either of the teams playing how they played at Goodison Park. Especially the red team, who had all the good players, but were simply lousy. Some days you’re good enough, some days you’re not.

Roy Hodgson, Watford’s manager, who has seen it all and isn’t going to let what happens now bother him, was in a perceptive mood after the game. He was talking about how confidence goes absent in relegation battles:

“The mood amongst the fans, I guess is pretty bad. I can’t speak for them, but the mood amongst the players isn’t as bad as all that. Any fair minded person wouldn’t put our defeat down to a lack of belief, desire or feeling that we can do this. Confidence comes from winning matches, and we don’t win matches, so how do you get that? There’s no words or training sessions that can necessarily do that. If you want confidence you’ve got to win.”

This was putting Leeds’ third goal into words. There didn’t feel like much danger when Sam Greenwood put a pass into Jackie Harrison’s feet on the edge of the penalty area with five minutes left, because we’ve seen those situations fizzle out before: a naive cross to nobody, or a check inside to lay off responsibility, or a shot blazing over the bar. But confidence comes from winning, and Leeds were 2-0 up against a feeble team with five minutes left. Harrison put his laces through the ball, a sweet straight shot staying low off the ground and powering inside the far post. “How do you get that?” Hodgson asked, answering, not in training sessions. You’ve just got to get yourselves into the position where your best version feels possible again. Winning 3-0 away is a very big step towards that better place.