Leeds United 1-0 Stoke City: Thinking less, doing more — Square Ball 6/3/24
HELLO BEN PEARSON
Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
Well done to referee Oliver Langford, who with a sense of
aesthetic flair his namesake Bonnie would be proud of, blew for full-time while
Leeds United goalkeeper Illan Meslier was flat on his back, ball in his hands,
down by the northern posts, gazing at what few stars he could make out beyond
the floodlights. He’d just made a big save to keep the score at 1-0 to Leeds, a
matchwinning save right at the end. Then a minute later he’d had to do it
again. This time, hearing the final whistle, Meslier could stay where he was
for as long as he wanted without fear of a booking, and throw the ball up into
the air above him, up there with the stars and floodlights like a size five
moon.
On the post-game lap of relief, sub goalie Karl Darlow made
sure his route took him to Meslier so he could pat him on the back, put an arm
around him, and tell him well done. Nobody knows goalkeepers like goalkeepers
know goalkeepers, so that mattered. Darlow probably thought he’d be playing a
lot more than he has this season. Watching Meslier against Stoke, and at the
weekend in Huddersfield, he knows better than anyone why he hasn’t.
For the rest of us, it’s not been ideal to have Meslier
being among the most important players in games against two of the division’s
lousiest teams. But different players contribute different things at different
times. When United’s attackers have been feeling fresh and popping shots here,
there, and into the goal, it’s been fine for Meslier to stand and watch and
pass and pick up a clean sheet bonus. Now, with the forwards looking jaded and
short of ideas, Meslier has been ready to make things as easy for them as he
can. If Leeds can only score one, the goalkeeper has made sure that’s enough
for a result.
The tired look about Leeds was worrying but not surprising.
Madness? This is not Sparta. This is the Championship. The EFL’s concept is to
arrange a 46 game season in such a way that it exhausts every good footballer
in the league until they’re cowed by stronger, bigger boys who will stop them
playing football. “Whoever is responsible for the schedule,” Daniel Farke said
after this game, “I would like to have a cup of tea with them one day and speak
about a few things.” The EFL sell this entertainment to Sky so they can put it
on the television to compete with Champions League football. Armchair viewers
with the right subscriptions on Tuesday night could choose between watching
Harry Kane scoring twice for the five-time European Champions from Munich, or Kylian
Mbappé getting a brace for Paris Saint-Germain, or extended bouts of
head-tennis live from Elland Road livened up by usually Preston’s Ben Pearson,
a player so thoroughly embedded at this level that I thought he was playing for
Huddersfield at the weekend but who came off the bench here for Stoke, getting
two yellow cards in half-an-hour, the ex-Old Trafford youth’s third sending off
in eleven games against Leeds.
My theory is that it’s easier for teams like Stoke and
Huddersfield to Champo while bleary because they don’t need to think very much.
They have to concentrate, which is different, but the modern mantra for teams
in trouble, even when they’re a goal down in a game, is to defend and waste
time and hope to nick a goal. Our Leeds, on the other hand, are trying to
invent ways to score, create dangerous situations, plot attacking moves: to
think, in other words, and then to get their weary bodies to act on the things
they think about doing.
Crysencio Summerville looks like putting all that together
is a struggle at the moment, so he’s sticking to the method he doesn’t have to
think about, cutting in from the wing and tap-tap-tapping in search of a gap
through which he can poke the ball towards the goal, or square it. This is
Summerville’s first full season as a first-choice footballer, and at times it
has been like that season in the Under-23s when he just kept running beyond the
last defender and beating the goalie one on one, over and over. Lately he’s
looked in need of some new ideas, right at the moment when fatigue is making
them harder to think up.
Dan James, by now, has been through all that and knows what
to do. If you’re too tired to think, think less and do more. Admittedly that
means James is still prone to those weird shots to the near post that always go
over the bar, but he’s moved on from the days when that seemed like all he knew
how to do. Now he knows that if you aim a shot across the goal, something will
happen, like it did here after half-an-hour. Georginio Rutter, another player
with moves not coming off, showed what it is to keep trying when swaying over
the ball and turning in deep midfield gave him room to send James down the
wing. Into the box went James, giving his touchpaper a twist before shooting
low and in off a defender. The deflection was a big help because, like Meslier,
Stoke goalie Daniel Iversen was having a big night. In stoppage time he stopped
James from making it 2-0 by blocking a powerful shot with his face: he was not
being beaten easily.
By that time Stoke were down to ten players but still
sensing that a result was there for them, which kept them coming forward
throughout the second half. The Potters had crept into ascendance by realising
they could get quickly past Pat Bamford and Rutter’s tired press, and that Glen
Kamara wasn’t enough to keep them away from Joe Rodon and Ethan Ampadu, where
at last they met trouble. Then, after Farke replaced his front two with Mateo
Joseph and Joel Piroe, and swapped Wilf Gnonto on for Summerville, United’s new
problem was too much energy and enthusiasm, as now Joseph and Gnonto’s scoring
senses were tingling and they were rushing forward every chance they got,
giving Stoke too many chances to counter.
Joseph, in particular, looked brilliant; after scoring two
at Chelsea he was first off the bench here, strong on the ball, and could have
scored two again. Bamford and Rutter had been dragged into anonymity; Joseph,
immediately, stood out as one of the best players on the pitch. The hitch that
might keep him out of the starting eleven was that he possibly wasn’t supposed
to be out there racing through on goal with a massive grin on his face. Farke
welcomed the chances Leeds had but worried about the “greed” to create them,
“transition, transition, transition,” because if you don’t score at the end of
your counter attack, “you allow the opponent also to take part in the game”.
Keep hold of the fucking ball, in other words, and I suspect Farke’s favourite
moment of Joseph’s game will have been when he went down in Stoke’s half to win
a stress-relieving free-kick.
Not that Farke wasn’t happy. “For me,” he said, “it’s the
best win in 2024,” and remember, there have been ten of those in the league in
that time, and one draw. Farke’s pleasure was, I think, the first inklings of a
siege mentality beginning ahead of the promotion run-in. This win was in spite
of the fixture list, the broadcast schedule, the fatigue, the expectations, and
even the home crowd, who Farke described as going to Elland Road “for a cup of
tea and a cake perhaps, instead of this explosion that we had against Leicester
where everyone was on it.”
Farke realises, though, that the Champo can be as tiring to
watch as it is to play. “You can’t expect that Elland Road is always such a
firework that it was in the last game (against Leicester), because when you
have 23 home games, plus cup games, if you would do this each and every game,
then it’s more like a candle who burns from both sides. And probably in the end
of the season no one shows up at Elland Road anymore,” because we’re all burnt
out and melted into a waxy lump. It was okay to be off it for this game,
because it was still enough, and the fans can save themselves for later, when:
“it’s again Leeds against the world, then we need our supporters even a bit
more.”
So Farke’s satisfaction was from the way Leeds, without
being given any advantages, won this game anyway. It wasn’t Leicester, it
wasn’t Chelsea, it didn’t explode, it was “another day in the office.” Keep a
clean sheet, score a goal, bank three points, forget how it happened,
concentrate on the next game. It was a tense Tuesday night against Stoke, who
seemed weirdly pleased to only lose 1-0, which tells you something about the
sort of game this was: a game you shouldn’t think about too much now it’s over.