Bradford City 2-1 Leeds United: Impact Football
Absence football, because I’m trying to think of what might be the opposite of total football. I’m still working on the terminology.
This report was very nearly about a lesson in how to win. Instead it’s about a lesson in how to lose and, pending a decision from Massimo Cellino, a swansong for Dave Hockaday.
How do you win a game of football? Impact. You do things that affect other things, affect them strongly. You make decisions, movements, runs, passes, shots that have an impact, that do something to the opposition.
The ultimate impact is a goal, but you can be impactful at different levels; a series of dangerous crosses, for example, even if they don’t all end in a goal, has an impact: your opponents have to think about how to defend against those crosses.
The same for incisive, attacking passes, or dangerous runs. Or if you’re on the bench rather than the pitch you can make a change, a substitution or a tactical decision, and have an impact on the game that way.
That the only impact Leeds United had on Bradford City last night was Mathieu Smith’s goal would still not have been okay even if we’d held on and won. If the game had finished 1–0 to Leeds I would have used that goal as an example of how Leeds can actually win, a contrast to how limp and aimless and pointless the other 89 minutes of absence football had been.
Absence football, because I’m trying to think of what might be the opposite of total football. I’m still working on the terminology.
In the end Bradford had two examples of their own of how to have an impact on a football match, and ended up deserved winners. Actually, they had loads of examples of impactful football, with at least seven good chances in the game compared to Leeds’ three; all of which came in the last few minutes.
It’s difficult to analyse Dave Hockaday’s Leeds United teams so far because there’s a strong temptation to only try and judge the part where there are eleven players on the pitch; and that part doesn’t seem to last very long. But it’s important to emphasise that Luke Murphy’s idiotic sending off didn’t change the way Leeds played: it just meant we had ten players doing nothing with the ball instead of eleven.