Brentford 5-2 Leeds United: Mind the gap - The Square Ball 4/9/22

UNFULFILLED

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

We should start with Luis Sinisterra’s goal, a treat. Just before half-time, Leeds were fuming, down 2-0 to an incoherent penalty and a harshly given, sublimely taken free-kick. They looked shocked, their only option to take their anger into the changing rooms and start again.

For the third time in his three starts, Sinisterra did something to change the run of the game on his team’s behalf, and this was the best yet. Against Barnsley, when Leeds’ second-string side were struggling to give him the ball and themselves a lead, he took both with a placed shot from 25 yards out. Against Everton, when Leeds were desperate to capitalise on dominance and equalise, he hit another long range shot, worth a point. He didn’t alter the result at Brentford, but that wasn’t his fault, and he did alter the mood in a way United should have made more of.

Brentford missed a Leeds throw-in and the ball went free. It looked like Rico Henry would capture it, but a zap of Sinisterra pace got him there first with a plan, and a toe to flick the ball up and over the defender into the centre of the pitch where he was fully in command. Twenty yards out, Sinisterra dropped the ball with his thigh, then stroked it across David Raya into the bottom corner.

It’s wonderful. It’s almost mundane. I bet it doesn’t get nominated for Premier League goal of the month. It won’t be anti-Leeds bias, the goal just isn’t spectacular enough. The stanchion doesn’t wobble, the net doesn’t burst, it’s not a top bin ping, it’s a bottom corner stroke. Sinisterra, deliberately, sucked all the circus even out of the flick ‘n’ thigh drop because he wasn’t out to impress here, or with his previous two, he was doing this to score. Take Tony Yeboah’s era-defining thunderbastard of 1995: that could have gone over the Kop if he’d misjudged it. Sinisterra took no risks. This was skill and judicious finishing.

With stuff like this coming from a player who has barely got up to full fitness this season, it’s perplexing anybody at Leeds wanted to interfere with the forward line in the final hours of the transfer window. Rodrigo was a loss to injury, sure, and with two bad misses against Brentford — one so awful we shall not speak of it here — Pat Bamford is looking more rust than iron man. But Bamford can improve, Rodrigo can come back, Joffy Gelhardt can play, and Mateo Joseph or Sonny Perkins can get some experience on the bench. Meanwhile, Brendan Aaronson can attack with urgency, Jackie Harrison can keep the forwards well supplied, Crysencio Summerville is a pest for minutes, Sinisterra is cutting through with numbers already. If you chucked Dan James into all that you’d feel like Leeds had a lot going on up front, and the stats so far bear it out: with ten goals, Leeds are the last of just six Premier League clubs with ten or more. They’re a little over their expected goals, which is fifth best in the division (excluding penalties). Creating and scoring is going just fine.

Every player can always be replaced by better, and more cover can always strengthen a squad, but with five new outfield players featuring regularly and an attack working well, Leeds would have been justified to stand by their summer work and leave well alone. And yet, and yet.

After this game, Jesse Marsch tried to account for “a very crazy last 48 hours” of the transfer window. Instead he made things worse by saying of Dan James’ departure, “it was clear that if we needed to add something that we needed to move something.” When fans hear ‘one in, one out’ they hear ‘finances’, because that’s the usual use of that idiom, but Marsch wasn’t talking about money. That wouldn’t make sense, because a season’s loan of Dan James to Fulham would have made next to no difference to the club’s ability to bid €43m for Cody Gakpo, or €12m for Bamba Dieng, or whatever they were offering for Hwang Hee-chan, Joel Piroe, Kelechi Iheanacho or Ben Brereton-Diaz.

He was talking, as he was before the Chelsea game and at various times this season, about the balance of his squad. He’s been wanting a different kind of forward to the ones he had, and to make room on the roster for that player, Dan James would have to go. It was about creating a ‘position’, so instead of another winger always playing striker, Leeds would have the striker and one less winger.

“When we were trying to think about how to get the balance right in the team,” Marsch tried to explain this weekend, “this was the key, [James] was garnering the most interest and it was the only way that we could create flexibility to try and go out and add a striker position that we felt we needed.”

Leeds thought a deal was confirmed with Cody Gakpo, so James could safely travel to Fulham. “We had a plan,” said Marsch, “and certain things got pulled out from under us based on decisions from players and agents and clubs that we didn’t anticipate.” That left Victor Orta howling in a conference room in Eindhoven, convinced he’d been ‘tricked’, and left Leeds with Dan James out, and nobody in, and a big hole in the squad they had been sure they were filling with Gakpo. Hence the deals for Dieng or any credibly warm body they could get, eventually coming down to Wilfried Gnonto. He’s since been seen wandering in a daze around Thorp Arch, meeting Marsch and being sent back to Zurich to work out what just happened and get his stuff.

“We were thinking that we [would] leave him in Zurich,” Marsch said, “with the idea that maybe we bring him in a transfer window or maybe two, just to give him time to continue to develop where he was at. But then we felt we needed to accelerate that decision based on what the window was panning out to be.” Because it was panning out to be a ‘one out, nobody in’ mess. And, in the end, it still is, because speaking before the Chelsea game, Marsch made it clear that Gnonto will not be able to fill Dan James’ experienced boots in the squad:

“I still feel to balance out our squad effectively [a new striker] would be helpful. But we need the right guy. We need the right guy. And I don’t want to bring in somebody that’s going to take three months to adapt and educate and then not be ready to help us … it’s not just, yeah, we need a striker and pick them out of the sky. It’s who is the guy that can meet the standards and the balance of what we need within the squad?”

He might not have been perfect, but that sounds more like a job for Dan James than for Wilfried Gnonto. It might be the job for Gakpo, and both Orta and Andrea Radrizzani have been saying we’ll be back to PSV for him after the World Cup. Until then, Leeds still have to wait for Bamford to get sharp, Gelhardt to develop, Rodrigo to recover, exactly as if they had done nothing at all, only now without James as cover. The idiotic waste of energy, with the net result of weakening an area of the squad that was strong, condemns the board more than any accusations of poverty. They’ve got money. What’s lacking is sense.

And at Brentford the problem was the defence. Leeds couldn’t have asked for a worse game for showing up their blind spot over signing a left-back, of whom Leeds currently have none fit, instead of a marquee striker to jostle where Leeds have sufficient. This isn’t the fates showing up a squad gap, this is a squad gap showing up a squad gap. United’s left-back on the day, Pascal Struijk, was again a good performer, although his struggles going forward in a formation that relies on attacking full-backs aren’t helping the forward line. When Luke Ayling came on at right-back for Cody Drameh, had his nose smashed, then came back on again, he showed what a difference a player driving from deep into the penalty area can make to this team, immediately setting up chances and helping Marc Roca pull back another goal to make the score 3-2. We miss the same thing coming from the left, but the bigger problem with Struijk at left-back is that his talent and good form are not being used at centre-back, where Diego Llorente looks determined to take this ship down and all the crew with it.

The game had gone to 3-1 when Robin Koch was caught out by Llorente’s sudden appearance next to him on the half-way line. Neither of them cut out a long ball forward so Illan Meslier did what he could, only sweeping it to Ivan Toney, who chipped into the empty net for his hat-trick. Immediately after Roca made it 3-2, Koch helped Brentford make it 4-2, flicking a long ball on to Bryan Mbeumo, putting him through onside to score. It’s hard to blame Llorente for that one, although I’m feeling uncharitable so I might anyway. The fifth was all Diego. Brentford’s pressing of our defence was much better than United’s attempts at the same, and Llorente seems least well equipped of our back line to cope against that. No, Diego, a drag-back is not the answer. Yoane Wissa nicked the ball from under his studs and raced through, Llorente dropping a needless stoppage time anvil on Leeds’ own toes.

The only practical steps that look ready to be taken over this result are about the refereeing. “Maybe it’s time for me to have some discussions [with the authorities] and try to figure out why some of these things are happening and how to have dialogue,” said Marsch, who was sent off for loudly complaining when a shirt pull and push on Summerville didn’t get a penalty, or even a pantomime glance at VAR from Robert Jones. “That lack of VAR visit, in the end for me is a lack of respect,” said Marsch, contrasting it with the four dreary minutes of painstaking analysis of slow motion replays on screens in Stockley Park and the stadium that came up with a penalty and yellow card against Sinisterra that few, had it all been left to play out in real-time, would have made much of a deal about. Should that have been a penalty? Eh, maybe? It’s so borderline it’s hard to care, and the way Leeds defended meant defeat was on the cards anyway. I’d have been miffed if, in a world without VAR, Jones had given it, but c’est la vie. Instead, the sheer boredom of watching a referee standing with his finger in his ear, waiting for someone miles away to decide whether he should trot fifty yards to look at a screen and decide, becomes my motivation for opening with Luis Sinisterra’s goal, and ending with it too. What a goal, what a great bit of football, how great life will be if he keeps playing so well. When you’re giving me football, give me that, and much more like it, please.