Norwich City 0-0 Leeds United: Skip to the good part — Square Ball 13/5/24

IT'S FINE

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

In the post-match press conferences, Norwich City manager David Wagner said enough for everyone. “I’m absolutely fine with the performance,” he said, “and the shift the players put in defensively.” He was in “a very positive mood” about drawing at half-time in the tie, and if he had the vaguest air of a dad being “absolutely fine” about coming second in an egg and spoon race, it was only because his team will be playing the second half away.

In the meantime this game can be tossed aside until Thursday night, then dragged out again and made to fit into whatever gaps the damn ‘narrative’ demands. The ninety minutes at Carrow Road were about as anti-storyline as football gets, as all the ingredients – one manager and his staff going back to their former club, one manager still sulking about Garry Monk shoving him about, decades of player-theft, the dreadful things done at Carrow Road to Luciano Becchio, Norwich’s Shane Duffy facing police charges in the build up, remembering that Pat Bamford used to play for Norwich like he used to play for everybody – were nullified. Every plot point and every twist of drama were squeezed out by the tedium, but don’t fear, The Narrative will be undefeated in the end: as forgettable as this game was, it will be remembered later, for one team’s ‘failure’ to seize whatever opportunity was here.

Whichever manager ends on the losing side will be retrospectively scolded for this match, Wagner for not using home advantage to have more of a go at a curiously defensive Leeds, and Daniel Farke for that curious defence against a side that finished seventeen points behind in the league table. It is fairly ludicrous. 180 minutes of football isn’t much, after 46 games, but all this play-off first leg did was reduce that to ninety. 120 minutes at most. (People tend to put their stopwatches away for penalty shootouts.) A long season will end with a short, sharp shock.

Farke may have felt he had no other option after the final home game of the season, against Southampton, failed to jumpstart his downdumps team. Afterwards, he spoke a lot about the “basement” of being “rock solid”, and how getting back to their clean sheet era was as much about building confidence as building a platform for the second leg. “We wanted to gain our defensive stability back,” he said, “and after we had this confidence and this stability back, we turned then in order to control the game more and more with possession, with our normal style, so for that it worked quite well.” United are (cautiously) back, hello, hello.

On the pitch, this looked like Archie Gray in attacking midfield, the no.10 spot, behind Georginio Rutter. I’ve been wondering if this tactic might become more prevalent now so many teams are playing out at the back – instead of coaching a striker to tackle defenders in their own six yard box, why not just play a defensive midfielder up front and let them do it? There you go Jesse Marsch, you can have that one for free. Gray was there, in front of Ilia Gruev and Glen Kamara, to make it harder for Norwich to get through midfield, then to turn and play forward passes to a still-handy forward three.

Gray’s was a surprising name but the change was not, Farke will tell you with a shake of his head, that big of a deal. “We’re never predictable,” he said before the game, when asked how he would keep Norwich from being too well prepared. “During the season we have always (had) different options, played different base formations.” Gray at 10 was just another one of those. “But the principles are more or less always the same,” he went on, and this is what coaches try to make understood nowadays, that they’re less bothered about where the players are standing at kick-off than the instructions and ideas they’re carrying out. On that subject, Farke did trail some of what was coming in his pre-match chat: “We also work on being flexible, and this is what we have done in the last seven days. To work on our principles, to sharpen our work against the ball, to sharpen our positioning.” Gray’s brand new role was, in its way, about getting Leeds back to feeling like old Leeds, ‘old’ meaning two months ago. You get confidence back by getting the basics right, Farke said afterwards. “It’s not like you can press a button and then the offensive game is like a firework … good solidity in defensive behaviour is always the basement, and I’m happy that we had this first step. Then hopefully the second step, by scoring, comes this coming Thursday.”

Hopefully! There weren’t many signs of scoring on Sunday, partly due to Georginio Rutter’s shadow being hard for Gray to find. “We wanted him (Rutter) sometimes to stretch a game, sometimes to play a bit like a false nine,” said Farke, “and open gaps where Willy Gnonto and Cree Summerville could explore the space.” But Gnonto was busy exploring the referee’s psychology and Summerville was efficiently marked up, so United didn’t make many chances.

They did get the ball in the net, though, from a lovely move down the left that lulled Norwich goalie Angus Gunn into a Kiko Casilla style collision with Duffy, leaving Junior Firpo to roll the ball into an empty net and leaving Farke to fume about an offside call he felt should have favoured the attacker. “I have twelve apologising letters at home already,” Farke said, official contrition for decisions he says, given the right way, would have sent Leeds up automatically.

That the attacker not being favoured for this offside call was Junior Firpo tells a lot about how Leeds played. He wasn’t only the finisher of that move, the best of the game, but the instigator too. Like the poetry of William Blake but for very different reasons, Farke’s Leeds raise big questions about the sources of creativity that feel more likely to be answered by divine communication than Junior Firpo burning bright, yet here we are.

The other big chances fell one each to Rutter and Sam Byram, and each came up with an air kick, so there’s another basement basic for Farke to work on this week: how to kick the ball. I’m not entirely not serious. The first half was characterised by Leeds players doing lots of basically dumb stuff, from Illan Meslier and Joe Rodon playing passes out for throw-ins, Rutter giving away stupid fouls, Summerville taking so long to think about his next pass he got tackled.

Perhaps that was the best justification for Farke’s decision to use this game as a palate cleanser for Thursday. He mentioned building up confidence five times afterwards. The yellow cauldron or whatever of Carrow Road was a safe place for Leeds to get their recent stupidities out of their system, to remember which leg to stand with and which to kick. But that’s what sets up the narrative problem I mentioned at the start. Farke may yet stand accused of wasting the dominance Leeds had in the second half of the first leg, but they only got to that dominance by adopting the safety-first stance that held them back from taking advantage.

It all comes down to Thursday night, anyway, to find out if Leeds United’s season will all come down to one afternoon at Wembley at the end of May. It seems like so little when this season has been such a lot, but it’s the only way of finding out how much any of this, or a play-off first leg, will matter. In the meantime, we’re fine with it. It’s fine. We’re absolutely fine.