Leeds are showing Championship consistency – so should they stick or twist in January? — The Athletic 10/12/23

By Phil Hay

Leeds United away at Blackburn Rovers is one of those dates where Lancashire Police cancel rest days and pull in staff from everywhere. Blackburn are in the habit of allocating over 7,000 away tickets for this fixture, taking the money while the local constabulary takes the weight of controlling the streets outside Ewood Park.

In no small way, the winter weather did part of their job for them yesterday — nothing keeps order like stormy skies which send people running for cover. Blackburn’s pitch survived well enough, albeit at the cost of a few battle scars, but in-and-out was the order of the day, from the police vans to the dugouts.

Not much is rattling Leeds this season, though, and a bit of rain in the Lancashire hills was merely part of the aesthetics.

Another game won, another performance as manager Daniel Farke expects it and another weekend in the Championship navigated. Those 7,000 made for noisy away-end tenants, and one stray who popped into the home fans’ section was chased out before half-time, but Farke’s team have a knack for avoiding histrionics; routine and regular, covered in patterns of familiarity, in no way cruising but not prone to living on their collective nerves.

Convention at Elland Road is that Leeds retain a degree of unpredictability or volatility, the uncertainty about exactly what you will get from them on any Saturday, but while there have been times in the past when identity was highly pronounced and effective, they are not often as born-of-a-manager’s-textbook as this.

Leeds can stick four past Huddersfield Town when the mood takes them. They can cross the Pennines to Blackburn and dig in capably in the wet, without much deviation or trusting to luck. There is a consistency about them, just as there is a consistency about their manager, his ways and his mannerisms.

Deviation is what Farke wants to avoid next month, when January comes, the transfer window reopens and Leeds weigh up the dilemma of what to do in the less strategic of each European football season’s two markets.

He expects that he and the club are in for a quiet time; that, to use his words from a few weeks ago, clubs with a brain and anything about them make their key decisions during the summer window and hang the ensuing season on calls made then. Football being football, nobody can quite bring themselves to think that a “chilled month” — Farke’s phrase — is what the doctor ever orders in January, but there is no real malady in the camp, aside from the bug which kept Patrick Bamford out of yesterday’s match.

What, in transfer terms, would a manager do with this team and a bit of freedom to recruit next month?

Good housekeeping says, and the Blackburn game proved, that Leeds are a niggle to Sam Byram away from having to find solutions at left-back, given that Junior Firpo is a perennial mystery. When Byram felt something niggle in a hamstring in the second half, Farke sent on Tottenham Hotspur loanee Djed Spence, a Premier League defender who is rusty having not played for three months because of a knee injury but needs only small moments in the Championship to look slick and sure of himself.

Diverting off the safe path of square pegs in square holes is rarely advisable but Spence, in full-blown mode, is the type who would play wherever, and probably play well. Even so, left-back is where the ice is thinnest.

🔥 "What a strike from Dan James!" pic.twitter.com/rGIdm1VVa7

— Leeds United (@LUFC) December 9, 2023

Further forward, asking for more would be plain greed.

Dan James scored the first of Leeds’ two goals in the game and now has seven for the league season, on top of four assists. Crysencio Summerville got the second with school-yard nonchalance and is up to nine, on top of six assists. Joel Piroe has eight and one. Georginio Rutter has four and eight. It would be uncharitable to point out that elsewhere in the division, Yorkshire neighbours Sheffield Wednesday’s entire squad, from top to bottom, have 13 and 11 for those two metrics.

Farke, to date, has not had to make too much of Willy Gnonto. He has had to make even less of Jaidon Anthony.

He did not sound remotely threatened by the idea that anyone might take an interest in the best of his squad when the window opens on New Year’s Day. “Everyone in the club knows we are ambitious,” Farke said. “There’s no temptation to give our key players to other clubs. Why should we do this?”.

To listen to what is being said around Farke, continuity is his priority in January, even with names in his dressing room who are not particularly prominent.

Leeds, as it stands, have no intention of courting loan interest in Joe Gelhardt, even though the young forward has hardly kicked a ball in anger since August. Gelhardt, an unused substitute again on Saturday, knows the drill — Farke can see circumstances where he might be required and, from his point of view, the 21-year-old has his place.

Charlie Cresswell, too, has been left in no doubt that he will be expected to stick around. Farke wants four centre-backs and Cresswell is one, even though he has played only a handful of minutes in the Championship since August and is now regularly falling short of making the bench. Long story short: Farke can do without disruption on any level.

This is how it looks at Leeds, a club where good players are starved of game time because, to be frank, there is no way in. As a result, selling a transfer to Elland Road is both easy and difficult: easy in the sense that this is a movement a footballer would want to join, but difficult in the sense that anyone who becomes part of it might end up following it as an observer.

Managers talk about squads rather than best XIs but whether or not Farke saw his current line-up as the strongest available to him when the last window closed, it is picking itself naturally, in fair weather and foul. Jon Dahl Tomasson, Blackburn’s head coach, said that in his estimation, Leeds are going up. Farke would never be so bold in predicting that with so many games left. But a quiet January would speak for his own levels of confidence.

Byram left Ewood Park needing medical assessment and likely to miss the two games this week. In that there was a message about where mitigating absences could be most prudent; about having enough without carrying excess baggage.

Leeds made their bed in August. The 20 league games since have made them happy to lie in it, chipping away, processing through the fixture list, and waiting to see if either of the teams above them, Leicester City and Ipswich Town, start to crack.

In this of all seasons, there are no rest days in the Championship either.