Leeds United 2-1 Wolves: Space, grass, ball - The Square Ball 8/8/22

BACK ON THE GRASS

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

After strenuous weeks of physical activation, long travel and intense study, who could wish come the weekend for anything more than to lie down in a lush meadow, the tickle of the grass upon your neck and your calves? To concentrate on the breeze and the sunshine, enveloping you across many millions of miles, everything near you feeling somehow further away than space.

Rasmus Kristensen started his season shocked in the field. After growling for the cameras at media day his debut look was toughened by a black eye from the Cagliari friendly. Wilf Copping never shaved on the morning of a match, so he could frighten forwards. With a buzzcut and a frown, maybe Kristensen doesn’t need more props. But after six minutes he needed to rebuild his reputation. His barge on Pedro Neto was his first meaningful Premier League act, but it was distorted amid new season howls from the witches in the well beneath the north-west corner of Elland Road, where our right-backs have to work. He span weakly away, leaving Wolves to score. His yearning was for the ground to take him down to the Wortley Beck coven. Instead, south from there, he was planked on his back for real, squinting into Beeston skies that even on warm days are a cold blue, while his other eye swelled purple from the punch of a goalie’s fist. That was a headache for Kristensen but caused barely a ripple in the third-brain of the VAR. A goal down and no penalty. It didn’t look like Rasmus Kristensen, or Leeds United, were having the weekend they wanted.

The match snapped along competing lines of philosophy between Bruno Lage’s Wolverhampton Wanderers and Jesse Marsch, declaring a new morning at Leeds United. Wolves came to Elland Road thinking about time and space. Time: they are against that. The clocks in Wolverhampton must tick different. From kick-off the old-golden players lay down on the ground, giving in to the tempting turf, as if by staying very still and horizontal the Peacocks might not attack them. They wanted to close their eyes until all this tumult blew over on the final whistle, and soon night, when players turned nocturnal by resemblance to the emblem on their chests could quit this daylit grumbling and be themselves.

Wolves were also thinking about space. There were hundreds of yards of it between the touchlines at Elland Road, and their routes to goal started by moving far from the ball and each other towards anywhere there was nothing. They scored when Ruben Neves turned a loose ball into a one touch missile over forty yards as the crow flies. This was when Kristensen tried shoving but Neto was too strong, taking the ball and a quarter of the pitch for himself. He chipped his cross high, and as it dropped it was headed down by Hwang Hee-Chan and volleyed up by Daniel Podence, the ball pinging down again off the crossbar and steeply into the roof of the net, as if it was trying to evade the constraints of frame and bag that were its fate. The Wanderers’ idea was to look for where the action wasn’t and go there, with Neves in the middle untroubled about sending the ball over any distance to his friends in big spaces.

United’s philosophy was opposite. Not space, but ball. Ball ball ball. Wherever the ball went they rushed to it, competed for it, they were obsessed with it, not the having of it, but the getting it. To Leeds, space was just ground in the way. The players were all intent on being close to the ball so they were always close to each other, so when they seized it, they could rush with it to goal. Their two guiding lights were ball and goal, and like flickering crowds of moths they swarmed from one to the other. For their equalising goal Leeds, with the ball at Jackie Harrison’s feet from a sharp chest pass by Pat Bamford, had attacking as their only aim, and that’s why his forward pass was imperfect, effectively to Rayan Aït-Nouri. That wasn’t like giving up possession because Aït-Nouri couldn’t take control before feeling the magnetic energy of Rodrigo and Brenden Aaronson clamping him, Harrison coming too, chasing his own pass to win the ball back again. As Aït-Nouri tried to turn out of danger, Aaronson worked the ball loose from him, and when Neves tried to kick it clear into the big wide open spaces away to the north-east, Harrison was too close, too fixated on it, blocked it. Rodrigo took the ball, took a sidestep and took an early shot that beat Jose Sa at his near post, then he freaked out in front of the South Stand, yelling and thumping his own chest sore.

Wolves’ game earned them two big chances to go back ahead. The first, just before half-time, almost repeated the goal, Jonny playing diagonally towards Neto in the furthest reaches, him crossing low this time from his languid space, a touch by Hwang putting Leander Dendoncker through. With no space between them Illan Meslier read Dendoncker’s shot and wrote his foot into its path. In the second half, from a corner, Dendoncker aimed a powerful header just below the crossbar, where Meslier’s strong jabbing hand pushed it clear. Already this season Leeds have reasons to thank their unrufflable goalkeeper.

Wolves swung the second half’s battle of wills in their favour by simply not allowing Leeds’ players near the ball they coveted. More Wolves moved forward, filling more space and shortening their passing distances. They couldn’t roam the same way but this was better for them, and if the ball did go stray, it went to them. The Leeds players could not get to the ball, but the Wolves players could not get to the goal. There was one breach, when Hwang bust away from Diego Llorente into the box, but Kristensen tracked and pounced, a hazardous tackle executed so perfectly even a Wolves player couldn’t feign a foul from it. This was the Rasmus we saw in the adverts.

Leeds had to think of a way of getting the ball so Rodrigo, with a goal on top of his contributions to the leadership council, was replaced by Mateusz Klich, the rebel. Now Leeds had another player directed to steal who could pass and shoot, too. The last wasn’t needed, but Klich’s thieving put Leeds’ prize back in their grasp, the ball, and after taking a straight forward pass from Tyler Adams that skidded through lines of Wolves, Klich’s passing made this moment a chance where there’d been none, the ball moving on to Bamford, whose square cross was finished by Brenden Aaronson. The haters at the Premier League, spellbound by their freezeframe replays that can detect the meagre influence of Aït-Nouri’s toe and call this an own goal, but can’t see a gloved fist pounding a great Dane, are taking this goal away from Aaronson, but it was his.

Aaronson was the most impressive of Leeds’ new signings. He exemplifies Leeds’ jonesing for the ball, and then he has ideas for using it. Not plans — his schemes don’t look premeditated — but he always comes up with something. Later in the weekend, on the other side of the world, his younger brother Paxten scored for Philadelphia Union, popping up on the edge of the penalty area, his shot looping off a Cincinnati toe up and over their goalie. It was a consolation in a 3-1 defeat, so a bad night for Philly, but with Brenden’s girlfriend Milana proudly suiting up for her university soccer team after four knee surgeries in four years, a good weekend for the Aaronsons.

For Tyler Adams and Marc Roca, together in midfield, it is harder to make an impression, not only because they are playing on land Kalvin Phillips used to own, but because their game is destructive first, about making Wolves’ desire for space seem preposterous by always being on top of the ball. Sometimes they will struggle to assert themselves, like at the start of the second half when Wolves were careful in possession. Sometimes they will look sloppy because their passing does not have to be perfect, so long as Leeds’ forwards are near enough where the ball goes to chase it. But Adams’ pass to Klich to make the winner was.

There were other good performances and cameos but it was fitting that the weekend depended on one of our oldest hedonists. Perhaps it could have been Charles De Ketelaere playing where Rodrigo started, maybe it could be Aaronson when Dan James or Luis Sinisterra are available. But when Klich went there it became the party zone for a player who lives for weekends, and for chances to make his personality play for the team. Klich wants to winter in Qatar, where debauchery is strictly confined, but it will be soccer’s grossest jamboree and he wants to be part of it for Poland. Maybe half-hours like this will keep everybody loved up enough for their bliss dreams.

If that means Klich must maintain bickering with Jesse Marsch so be it. Plenty do. Saturday’s tempestuous dugouts mirrored the pitch, Marsch grasping for any ball that came his way, chucking it back for throw-ins and free-kicks to move, showing his irritation when Wolves’ players tucked in for grassy snoozes. Lage was also letting his irritation with the Wolves players show in bigger, bolder gestures as the result got away. He turned all his animosity on Marsch at full-time, both of them bringing steam from last season, but while Lage could only point, glower, allude to “things you cannot say” and go home, Marsch was brushing it off. He went to join in on the pitch, the spaces filling with kids from the terraces wanting shirts, weaving between players who had now lost interest in the ball, until next weekend. Rasmus Kristensen, stomping the grass down beneath his boots, toured the field, screaming at the crowds, stand by stand. This must have been him happy.