Leeds United 0-1 Blackburn Rovers: The weight of numbers — Square Ball 15/4/24

100 CORNERS

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Daniel Farke is in his exasperated era. Since he took over as manager, Leeds United have been unbeaten at Elland Road in 21 consecutive league games. They won seven in a row at home and then, after a draw, won another nine in a row. Then came four days in April: no goals for, one goal against, a draw and at last a defeat. And a feeling like this is what everybody was waiting for all along.

How can sixteen home wins – as many as Leeds won home and away in the previous two seasons combined, more home wins than Marcelo Bielsa’s champions in 2019/20 from one game less – feel, in the end, so unconvincing? Farke could be excused for spluttering a little when he’s asked what’s going wrong, why Leeds are failing, how he’s going to fix the problems. What, exactly, problems?

Farke can argue, fairly, that he deserves a better break than this. Somehow, even after so many wins, after Leicester’s two defeats, after Ipswich had failed to capitalise on our bad results against Coventry and Sunderland, Elland Road never felt like a theatre ready for a result on Saturday lunchtime. The feeling was that we’d seen this show before, too many times. 73 per cent possession, nineteen shots to three. Blackburn had conceded ten goals in their last two away games. Leeds were in control. Dominant. Dangerous. They were following a script that has worked sixteen times. And they looked doomed.

It wasn’t just Blackburn’s goals against column or their league position that made it clear Leeds should win this game, but Blackburn’s performance. Their midfield was miles away from the standard required, passing out of play more easily than they passed to each other. Farke had made the changes people wanted – Connor Roberts at right-back, Archie Gray replacing Glen Kamara in midfield, Wilf Gnonto on the wing and Joel Piroe replacing Pat Bamford up front – and even if Gray seemed a little lost, and Piroe wasn’t imposing, he was getting the same overall level of performance. Leeds had ten attempts on goal by the hour.

Some teams, in some games, would call this success, playing themselves into a situation from which they should win the game. Somehow it didn’t feel that way on Saturday, or when dominating Sunderland the same way in midweek. It has started to feel like the actual games are happening to some other team, somewhere else, while neither the Leeds players nor their manager can turn what should be the positive momentum of their attacking into positive results. The rock they’re rolling doesn’t move faster, it just grows bigger, until it’s all Leeds can do to stop it from rolling back over them. Meanwhile, undeterred by United’s efforts and metaphors, Rovers were ready in the real world to take real advantage. Sometimes, when Leeds are expecting to score, they forget there’s another team on the pitch.

Which fits with the feeling that Leeds are beating themselves in games like these, which suggests another scenario, that they’ve won a lot of those sixteen games in spite of how they play. Which is an unfair suggestion, but Farke is making it difficult to judge its fairness by doing what he’s said over the last few weeks Leeds mustn’t deviate from his course. There were 25 minutes left when Farke started chasing a win. On one hand, this was welcome. Farke is often criticised for not making changes early enough, and here was an attacking triple substitution with plenty of time to go. But, criticised or not, Farke has won 26 league games this season by doing things his own patient way. The sudden switch to chasing a win over Rovers added firepower, but eroded confidence. With 25 minutes to go, was Farke panicking?

Farke was going for it, then with ten minutes left he went for it some more, and it cost Leeds the game. Bringing Mateo Joseph on for Wilf Gnonto was not a straight swap, and the players knew it, but they didn’t know what it meant. Three at the back with Junior Firpo pushing to left wing, it looked like, with Joseph up front with Bamford, ahead of Crysencio Summerville and Piroe as a pair of playmakers with Gray behind and Dan James on the right pleading for the ball. But while that was still being discussed, Joe Rodon was beaten to a goalkick in the air, Sam Byram couldn’t stop Tyrhys Dolan turning, and Ethan Ampadu and Gray – not helped by Ilia Gruev’s earlier substitution – left Sammie Szmodics unmarked and ready to score his 24th goal of the season. Blackburn have only scored 57 overall. He was the wrong player to lose, at the wrong time.

Whether Gnonto was the wrong player to take off became one of the post-game arguments. Farke’s point was that the medical staff had only greenlit him for an hour, and that he was breathing heavily between attacks. The counterpoint is that Gnonto’s attacks were United’s best, and when a player is already twenty minutes into the dangerzone, what’s another ten minutes when you’re chasing a win for promotion, ahead of a nine day break? But the real problem was not the personnel change, but the complexity. By the time you’re signalling to the players that you want an asymmetrical 3-1-3-3, you’re much further off the rails than you need to be when you’re dominating at home and the score is 0-0, with ten minutes left plus stoppage time.

How have Leeds got themselves into this position, chasing wins out of draws and turning them into defeats, with three games left? First, through an incredible run of form that, helped by Ipswich and Leicester’s struggles, has brought them closer to automatic promotion than anyone expected at Christmas. If they’d merely matched their first half of the season Leeds would now have a healthy 84 points and be comfortable in 3rd place, and we could be lauding Farke for navigating a difficult season against unprecedented frontrunners into a play-off chance. Instead, they’ve dominated 2024, seven points better than Ipswich, sixteen better than Leicester, and are now one point away from the automatic promotion places. It’s the hope, I guess, that kills you.

But it’s also the numbers, the sheer weight of them. Farke tried to invoke them in the build up to the Blackburn game. “I like to stay humble and don’t want to be in the spotlight,” he said, but:

“I love the statistics. I think I was nominated three times right now, or won three times the manager of the month. I’m nominated for manager of the season. We’re playing the best season in the history of this club. We have the best defensive record. We have the best home record in this league. We have the best home record in the history of Leeds United Football Club. We are there with 87 points after 42 games. We share many, many goals. We have the best goal difference. We have still the chance to play the perfect season.”

“Yeah,” he added, with a touch of sarcasm, “but it could be that it’s perhaps because of me that we are not there even better in the table and already promoted.”

These were, obviously, daft things for a manager to say on the eve of their first home defeat of the season. But after a second game without scoring and a second defeat in three games, Farke was still concentrating on numbers:

“It’s up to me to find solutions to make sure that we score. So if thirty corner kicks are not enough to score in the last two games, I have to work with them (the players) that we perhaps create, in the next two games, forty corner kicks. And if twenty wide area free-kicks are not enough, I have to make sure that we create thirty wide area free-kicks. And if all the balls through the box, if no one is on the end of the cross, perhaps next time we will play even without any players at the back, and put them all up front. So it’s more like training to work on our efficiency, and perhaps even to work a bit more on creating even more situations.”

The Leeds United shirt, Farke said before the game, “is the heaviest shirt in the league”. And I’m not sure that all these big numbers aren’t making it heavier. It’s the curious paradox of football, that Blackburn won from three shots and celebrated being close to Championship safety like it was promotion, while the rest of Elland Road fumed at them, jealously. If we can’t score from thirty corners, why not forty, if not forty corners, fifty, and if not fifty, how about Blackburn’s approach, and getting just one chance and scoring it?

Leeds United’s problem is obvious: it’s the pressure. The same pressure is also the gift that is keeping Ipswich and Leicester within reach, that means the top three have scored one goal between them in 540 minutes this week, taking three points from eighteen available. The two teams that solve this problem will go up, and Farke needs to decide whether trying to increase the pressure on Middlesbrough, QPR and Southampton in the next three games, through sheer weight of attacking numbers, will release Leeds, or turn more pressure on.