How Leeds will tackle five games and 2,000 miles in 15 days — The Athletic 31/1/24
By Phil Hay
We have arrived at 2024’s Green Football Weekend, the annual
juncture where the sport tries to give the impression it is paying attention to
climate change.
Leeds United’s designated ‘green game’ is away against
Bristol City on Friday, a night match that finishes after the last trains from
Bristol will have long since departed.
UK broadcaster Sky Sports opted to televise this fixture and
switch it from the default slot on Saturday afternoon, rendering post-match
public transport options for away fans looking to make the 212-mile (330km)
journey back to Yorkshire minimal to non-existent.
Still, it’s the thought that counts.
Aside from environmental issues, Friday evening at Ashton
Gate encapsulates the schedule Leeds are about to wade into. It’s a fortnight
unlike many at the club can remember on the domestic front.
Leeds’ squad will cover 2,000 miles in 15 days, with the
trip to Bristol City, another to Swansea City (a 520-mile round trip) and two
to Plymouth Argyle (640-mile round trips). Five games anywhere crammed into
such a short period would be a test of stamina at any point in a season but
these long-haul journeys to the south west of England and south Wales,
including an unwanted FA Cup replay with Argyle, are falling at a time when the
Championship’s promotion race is delicately balanced.
Even without that extra trip to Devon, February promised to
be an intense month, but Saturday’s 1-1 draw in the FA Cup’s fourth round left
Daniel Farke looking at the following rat race: Bristol City away on Friday, Argyle
away in the cup on Tuesday (February 6), Rotherham United at home on February
10, Swansea away on February 13, Argyle away on February 17. Three of those are
night games, while that final meeting with Argyle has been moved to a 12.30pm
Saturday kick-off, again to allow for a live broadcast on Sky Sports.
“We’re Leeds United,” manager Daniel Farke said of his team’s upcoming workload, “so even if we have to go on a bicycle, we go on a bicycle.”
Needless to say, Leeds will not be going by bicycle.
The club are planning to fly to each of those four long away
trips in an attempt to limit travelling time and optimise post-match recovery.
Some in fitness circles question whether taking planes
rather than coaches lowers the risk of injuries but nobody disagrees that fewer
hours of sleep can be detrimental for footballers, or that late arrivals home
after long trips by road tend to increase fatigue.
Though Farke made light of questions about the schedule in
front of him, he will now be in the thick of logistical preparation. It was at
his insistence that Leeds pivoted from travelling by train to fly to London for
September’s noon Sunday kick-off against Millwall — a game his team went on to
win 3-0.
Farke is bound to rotate for the replay at Home Park next
week but the glut of outings and the demands of covering so much distance in
just over two weeks will still require close monitoring of the stress loads on
his players. Farke has a specialist head of performance in his backroom staff,
Chris Domogalla, and Leeds had worked in advance to map out the run of matches
in front of them — only to see that draw with Argyle toss an extra cup tie into
the equation.
Callum Walsh, a fitness and conditioning expert who worked
as head of performance for Huddersfield Town and Turkish side Alanyaspor either
side of a role as head of sports science at Newcastle United, says the decision
to fly to these matches should work to Farke’s advantage by helping to maintain
fairly regular sleep patterns, limiting the loss of training time to
recuperation and recovery.
Walsh says: “Travelling to a game by plane or bus —
obviously one takes longer if you’re travelling a long distance but that
doesn’t necessarily have a huge impact on performance. What’s more important is
what happens after a game finishes in Bristol on a Friday night or Plymouth on
a Tuesday night.
“If you’re getting out of Plymouth at 11pm and travelling
(to Leeds) by coach, you’re not getting home and into bed until maybe five in
the morning. I don’t want to come across as ‘woe is me’ but it messes with your
sleep routine and I know from experience that it not only wipes out the day
when you get home, but you feel like you’ve been hit by a train the next day
too. It can massively impact the 48 hours after a game.
“Flying gets you back so much sooner, which means players
are in their beds at a relatively normal time — because even after a home game,
there’s always that adrenaline dump which stops most of them from going to
sleep for a little while afterwards.
“A lot of regenerative processes take place when you’re
sleeping. A normal cycle is really important when it comes to fatigue and
players’ mental state, and you’ve seen English clubs starting to stay over (on
the continent) after European away games, not travelling back immediately.
“The advantage Leeds have over some other clubs in the
Championship is that they’ve got the budget to fly to games. Some clubs
wouldn’t be able to do that, so the schedule would be even harder. I know Chris
(Domogalla) well and they’ll have been planning for this period a long way in
advance. Nothing about the preparation will be last-minute.”
Very few, if any, among the Leeds supporters aiming to
attend these matches will have the same luxuries or choices.
The weeks to come are a huge organisational minefield in
which the fanbase will tussle with awkward kick-off times, unreliable train
services and whatever the UK’s winter weather throws at them.
Battle lines between Leeds and Sky TV were drawn a long time
ago, as a result of the fact that the club’s ability to draw a big armchair
viewing audience in the Championship made them the subjects of endless fixture
rearrangements. Such disruption was raised at one of their most recent
supporter advisory board meetings and Sky is in the habit of being targeted
with choice chants about its coverage at any Leeds game it opts to broadcast.
Dave Whitmore, a self-employed decorator, has followed Leeds
since the 1970s and has not missed a game since the end of the Covid-19
pandemic. He insists he will be at all four of these long away trips, including
that cup tie in Plymouth.
Whitmore estimates that those excursions will require him to
take six days off work and, factoring in tickets, travel and hotel stays,
expects the cost in pounds to run well into four figures. A train back to Leeds
from Plymouth after the Championship game there on February 17 leaves roughly
two hours after the final whistle. “That gives us a good chance of making it,”
he says, “but if there’s any problem with it, or if there are cancellations,
we’ve had it.
“But that’s part of the problem. The trains have been
trouble for a long time. There were strikes when we went to Peterborough (a 2pm
Sunday kick-off in the FA Cup’s previous round last month), so we ended up
having to travel to Grantham and grab taxis from there (to cover the remaining
30-plus miles). Then you’ve got the kick-off times. You’ve heard the chants and
you hear that Sky don’t like them, but if you’re sending us to Bristol on a
Friday, or Plymouth at 12.30pm on a Saturday, what do you expect?
“I might end up taking six days off to get to all of the
games. In all my time following Leeds, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it fall
like this, where you’re doing this much travelling in such a short time.
“I don’t know if I’d say I’m looking forward to it. Probably
not, if I’m being honest, but you do it because you love it really, and you
don’t want to miss any games if you can avoid it. But that’s it — anywhere we
go, we sell our allocation. So to the people organising it all, it doesn’t
really matter.”
For Farke, these are potentially decisive moments.
The trip to Bristol City falls a day before fellow promotion
contenders Ipswich Town and Southampton play their matches, so Leeds will move
into the automatic promotion places for the first time this season if they win
on Friday.
A slow start to their campaign, though, means the margin for
error was always going to be small.
Emerge from this glut of away days and Leeds will plough
immediately into a home game against leaders Leicester City — another Friday
night fixture, on February 23.
“Although it’s a lot of travelling, managing games like
these isn’t anything Leeds won’t have done before,” Walsh says. “It’s an
abnormal run of games but clubs have people who are trained to manage
everything, and Leeds will use the processes that are already in place.
“It’s not always easy knowing what’s for the best. You could
stay down south between (the matches against) Swansea and Plymouth, but to do
that, you need lots of kits and equipment with you for the players, the staff
and the analysts. Sometimes, it’s better to go home and travel again than it is
to limit the travelling. These are the little nuances you have to think about.
“I worked abroad last season and, in Europe, they call these
‘English weeks’ — the periods where it goes Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday. It
doesn’t happen so much abroad but here, and especially in the Championship,
it’s what you get used to.
“It’s not as if it’s new for Daniel Farke (who managed
Norwich City from 2017-21). A coach working in England for the first time must
think, ‘Bloody hell, what is this?’, but if you know the league, you’re very
used to it.”