Daniel Farke needs the farther reaches of Leeds’ squad to make an impression — The Athletic 18/12/23

By Phil Hay

All you can say about the Nobel Peace Prize is that if Daniel Farke had any intention of winning it, he came to the wrong place.

Saturday’s match against Coventry had moved into punch-up territory well before the final whistle, and full time wet the head of a scuffle on the halfway line, Crysencio Summerville in the melee, irate and ruffling feathers.

Elland Road is where Billy Bremner, that legendary 10 stone of barbed wire, was made and honed, where people readily fight their own shadows, and no manager on this patch of Yorkshire should underestimate the job of keeping the peace.

Even a season like the one Leeds are having can be testing and contradictory; very good but not good enough, not easy to criticise but prone to criticism, everything examined in microscopic detail because Farke’s team, with the Championship table as it is, have no option but to win every game. And can only lament the consequences when they don’t.

Dropped points hurt the chasers more than the chased, and the problem for Leeds is that they cannot be too philosophical about deflating results without sounding like they are subconsciously resigning themselves to the play-offs in May.

Farke has got his new club this far — 42 points from 22 games; theoretically a highly competitive starting point — but in the Championship, nobody thanks you profusely for finishing third. Nobody thanks you for the torture that invites and nobody on Saturday was thanking him for a 1-1 draw which kept Leeds there for the umpteenth weekend in a row. “Frustration, disappointment,” Farke said. All of the above. “I don’t want to talk about the positives.”

Which is not really like him, but it was how most of Elland Road was feeling. Ipswich dropped points at home to Norwich in Saturday’s early kick-off, Farke’s old club giving him a hand, and there was an opening for Leeds to move through, with Ipswich due in town next weekend. Top two Leicester and Ipswich have been out in front for a long time now and the cold reality for Leeds is that if the fightback is coming, it will have to start very soon.

Farke tries not to get drawn into that conversation but that must have been the cause of his furrowed brow on Saturday: that in failing to ride roughshod over mid-table Coventry, a rare opportunity to make things interesting slipped by.

There comes a point in a season, even one as stable as Leeds’ 2023-24, where the positive impact of momentum is replaced by the lethargic effect of substantial amounts of football in a team’s legs. It felt as if Leeds hit one of those patches last week, between a wet defeat at Sunderland and a home draw against Coventry which found them looking slightly formulaic.

The nature of the players available to Farke gives him a certain level of individual unpredictability and yet, on an afternoon such as Saturday, their fixed and deliberate tactical cycle can find them going around in circles.

Leeds score many of their goals in roughly the same way: a clever pass to unlock things through the middle, with pace then taking someone — in the case of their finish against Coventry, Summerville — beyond the last man and into the red zone. Mark Robins, Coventry’s manager, said he had concentrated beforehand on how Leeds like to make a range of runs from the “No 10 pocket”, in essence telling his side that if they could avoid getting caught out by those, they would have a chance of getting something from the game.

As ever, Leeds had an ample number of chances, 20 shots on goal culminating in a gift which Dan James missed in the sixth minute of stoppage time. It was like trying to crack Coventry in the way that Leeds always do, with the ploys Farke always employs, with Summerville invariably more consistently dynamic than anyone else.

In management and coaching, philosophy is a virtue, and consistency can be too. Farke is nothing if not consistent in his selection of his starting line-up and it was that which got him talking about the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, about the fact that when it came to pleasing some players and upsetting others with his selection policy, he was not the United Nations.

But it is ever more obvious that there is a specific line-up which appeals to him most and which he is most loyal to, hence one change at Sunderland last Tuesday and none at all against Coventry, despite a hard slog at the Stadium of Light inviting more of a freshen-up.

Nine Leeds players have started at least 17 of the 22 Championship matches under Farke. Several of them will go past 2,000 minutes for the season shortly. He has not had to ask himself this question often since August but if the core of his squad — the men who regularly win games for him — come up short, who else is likely to deliver? And who else is in the right form to deliver?

Farke says he likes the group as a whole, so much so that he is not asking for vast amounts of change to it when the transfer window opens at New Year. But it is clear where his greatest trust lies and this spell of the campaign is where subtle rotation could pay off.

Leeds are well into the process of finding out if Ethan Ampadu can go on forever. Farke tends to turn to his bench later rather than sooner, inclined to think that what usually works will work again.

Coventry picked a defensive side, put a foot in, dug an equaliser out and refused to roll over. Robins, judging by his comments afterwards, had a firm idea of what he expected from Leeds and was not surprised or blindsided by them in the flesh. Some fine margins went their way, particularly when James poked his late shot past the far post, but their game plan worked better than it had for other teams who have tried the same at Elland Road, and they did not buckle when Summerville made it 1-0 on 58 minutes.

Bobby Thomas levelled with a hanging header. Ellis Simms led the line well in the face of limited odds, and Coventry’s threat on the counter never quite vanished. Farke is finding that the players he wants to be impact subs are sometimes merely subs, making no decisive impact. Willy Gnonto, with Christmas almost here, has one goal and one assist. Patrick Bamford has none of either.

That, in no small part, is because neither has been fit for every fixture — and neither can get much of a game because Leeds have been ticking over nicely. But football dictates that Farke will need the farther reaches of his squad to make an impression, to offer some variation, make their presence felt and help keep the chase alive.

Nobody knows if Leicester or Ipswich can be caught. Nobody wants to accept that they can’t be, and Farke seemed to be in that mindset after Saturday’s draw, aware that justifiable ways of praising his squad could not be allowed to sound like the pursuit of the top two is now a sideshow.

Because here, along with the appetite to fight everyone and anyone, is something else you find in Leeds: the last thing they want to be told in these parts is that their football club has upper limits.