Leeds have a solid base to build from – Farke knows what happens next is key – The Athletic 21/9/23

By Phil Hay

Ange Postecoglou has it right. Managers and players have a duty to work, to earn their corn and toe the line calmly between despondency and exuberance. But supporters? Live a little and dream the dream because football was not designed to imitate mundane life. Football is supposed to be where mundane life stops.

Daniel Farke saw that on Sunday as the away end at Millwall sucked him into the type of playful act he seemed more comfortable leaving to others: three waves of the arm to whip up the crowd and acknowledge a victory which got Leeds United’s section of the ground bouncing. Kalvin Phillips had that post-victory routine down to a ‘t’. Farke was almost too polite to partake, but where is the fun if not there, at a stadium where Leeds usually spend full-time reflecting on another chasing?

Ideally, one riotous win at The Den would have become two on the spin at Hull City on Wednesday, with Farke drawn into the same celebration, either unable to resist or unwilling to spoil the fun. It is not so long since he was lion-taming public expectancy, talking of “a bumpy road in August” which, in fairness to him, came to pass, but while shoots of promise see Leeds hovering in ninth place in the Championship, it would not disappoint him to see his squad become what he likes to call “the team of the moment”.

There were shades of Championship excellence against Millwall and, for an hour, strong shades at Hull, too, until Joe Rodon was sent off and a 0-0 draw represented the best a scuppered plan could offer. “In these circumstances, definitely a good point,” Farke said, not that he was telling himself that before Rodon’s dismissal.

Farke’s preamble for the game at Hull, his media duties on Tuesday, involved a chat about how it was when Norwich City, on the way to their first Championship title under him in 2018-19, started to think the season might be theirs. He recalled how Norwich embraced the carrot of promotion by avoiding making a big deal of it or allowing it to be a stick to beat themselves with. Farke insisted it was neither a banned nor burning topic of conversation. “We were never obsessed with the table,” he said. “We were never talking too much about promotion. We weren’t scared of it, we were allowed to speak about it, but we weren’t obsessed.”

That is the right balance as Postecoglou sees it; be circumspect on the inside but externally, don’t worry about the narrative moving and shaking. But after seven matches, Farke remains in that in-between zone, sensing something coming but waiting for the flames to fully take hold. Down to 10 men against Hull, Leeds dug their heels in for a draw and are sitting on just one defeat, a layer of concrete on which to build something. It took an injury-time penalty at Birmingham City to inflict their only loss, though it would be remiss not to point out that it took a staggering miss from Hull’s Adama Traore to spare them from another with a minute of normal time to play.

For a while at Norwich, there was no real need for Farke to ban talk of promotion, simply because no one was minded to talk about it. The same is most likely true of the squad at Leeds at present. His experience at Carrow Road was the equivalent of managerial whiplash: from being quizzed about the security of his job in September to being asked about winning the league in November. There, in two wildly transformative months, was the reason the more savvy head coaches try to be equivocal about what awaits them. Tomorrow’s conversation can soon supplant today’s, occasionally with ludicrous speed.

But it is a fact that for Farke and Norwich first time around, this was the part of the season when the penny started to drop; when the trend of conceding twice a game faded and Farke’s performance as manager demanded re-evaluation. On the far side of the year’s first international break, Norwich won four games back-to-back. Of the 18 from the middle of September onwards, they won 13 and lost only one, on the cusp of 50 points by Christmas. A parliamentary motion would later ask MPs to recognise, among other things, “Tom Trybull achieving a 90 per cent pass completion rate over the course of that season”, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that politicians dabbling in football can be an expedient marriage of convenience. But there were ample grounds on which to big Norwich up.

Suffice to say, by the midway stage, the questions Farke was fielding were predominantly about the table, an obsession on the outside even if chats about it were limited internally. The nature of football is such that it is easier to avoid talking about league position if a club’s ranking happens to be good. The table taking care of itself is precisely the point. A table which looks iffy is harder for a coach to skirt around, mainly because it is their job to sort it out. That might have been why Farke referenced Norwich’s initial form a few weeks ago; his way of saying that he was not oblivious to Leeds’ somewhat slow start.

Hull away was slightly beyond his control owing to Rodon’s dismissal, the result of a second booking that definitely was but an earlier booking that almost certainly wasn’t. It had not been one-way traffic before then but as the first half took shape, Leeds’ control increased and so did their dominance. Georginio Rutter’s chance was the big one, clean through and face-to-face with Hull goalkeeper Ryan Allsop. Rutter delayed while he moved the ball onto his left foot, long enough for Allsop to get a leg to his finish. Allsop was a change to Hull’s line-up, a debutant and a telling one. His fingertip save before half-time from Crysencio Summerville — on as an early replacement for the injured Willy Gnonto — was every bit as good.

Leeds, at their most fluent, were able to change the tempo of play effectively, but Rodon’s red card for a mistimed challenge on Aaron Connolly trapped them in the mud aside from sporadic bursts forward. Jaidon Anthony and Liam Cooper came on but possession eluded United more and more. They were feeling their way through the closing minutes when Traore, somehow, smacked the cutest of cut-backs from Connolly against the face of a post. The next 60 seconds were spent trying to work out how exactly he had achieved that feat.

“I’m pretty pleased with how well structured we are and how good we are going forward,” Farke said, with three straight clean sheets behind him. “The only thing I can criticise is our efficiency with putting the ball in the net.” This is where discussions inside the walls of Thorp Arch are bound to focus; on the minutiae needed to beat Watford at Elland Road this Saturday. The topic of promotion will be left to others to mull over, with the league waiting for Leeds to force their way into the thick of that conversation.