Everton 1-1 Leeds United: Trust against Barry
A manager is entitled, after much thought, to leave the players who kept a clean sheet last week out there on the pitch and expect them to keep doing their jobs, i.e., not conceding to Thierno Barry.
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Midway through the first half Radebe tried passing square across his back line, gave the ball straight to Yeboah, and watched open-mouthed as Yeboah ran through on goal. Was Tony distracted, even momentarily, by a thought of sympathy, a twinge of pity for his friend?
Kevin Blackwell was not the right manager for nurturing the kind of young talent Leeds had, back in the early days of the David O'Leary era, made a habit of bringing in, of whom Dan Harding was the last hurrah.
Everything seemed set for success, his way, with an ambitious club with a family ethos that would pay him handsomely. Nobody can say for sure why Don Revie, in the end, didn't go to Everton.
One good half at Everton was enough for Leeds United to win one half of a football match: but not the other. There are a few ways of looking at that. First is through the cliché: it is, at least until paranoid coaches and greedy administrators have their way about slicing it into quarters, a game of two halves.
Another angle is about being grateful, as a team that's fresh up, for any good halves at all. Although it often feels like yesterday in football was last year, it's still useful to check our Peacocks' reality against the last six clubs that were promoted to the Premier League. The best points total among them was Luton Town's 26. That's how many points Leeds United have now. Only Luton managed to win at Everton, Ipswich got a point, the other four were beaten. Everton, in those seasons, were worse than they are now.
That brings us to another view, about how Everton were able to turn the cosh they were under for the first 45 minutes to their advantage in the second half. It's probably as simple as this: they have a better manager and better players on their side. David Moyes has been doing this for decades and he could bring Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Jarrad Branthwaite off his bench to match Leeds United's formation with his stronger side.
Leeds had done well to force him into those half-time changes. Both players were short of match fitness and neither were supposed to be on the pitch so early, if at all. Moyes, the boos of Hill Dickinson ringing in his ears, was backed into making substitutions he didn't want to make, trying a formation he hadn't rehearsed, and hoping it worked. He was Daniel Farke at the Etihad.
Leeds had done more than well, in fact. In the first half here they emulated their first half-hour at Newcastle, a performance I described then as 'amazing'. I'll say it again! It wasn't the same line-up but it was the same sort of team, solid but not spectacular on paper, and it played the same style of aggressive attacking football. On Tyneside that was good for six first half shots (against four), a 2-1 lead and eventual defeat. The Merseyside version produced eight first half shots (against two), a 1-0 lead, and eventually a draw.
In these first halves Leeds were brilliant at Newcastle and better at Everton. In both matches Brenden Aaronson was a thrilling, freewheeling key. At Everton he was helped by Ethan Ampadu and Anton Stach controlling midfield — Ilia Gruev was there too — chasing Toffees and pushing them over, and by the attacking wing-backs being followed upfield by attacking centre-backs. Pascal Struijk had United's first shot of the match. The lead was gained from Joe Rodon bullying Iliman Ndiaye in his own half.
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While Big Joe was busily yelling at the fallen winger to get up, Stach, who had helped put him down, overlapped onto Jayden Bogle's jabbed pass. Jake O'Brien had to run out to him so Everton were left with James Tarkowski alone against Dominic Calvert-Lewin and, when a low cross went past them both, right-back Nathan Patterson had Brenden Aaronson and James Justin to cope with. So he went and hid behind Jordan Pickford while Leeds' left-back fired through them all.
That was just before the half-hour mark, and not long afterwards Calvert-Lewin almost had his homecoming goal in Everton's new home. A classic bit of Aaronson miscontrol bamboozled Idrissa Gueye and let our eager boy send the Blue back four running. Bogle's first time cross was deflected and Calvert-Lewin diverted it again, onto the post and out again. Once he was over it, he started laughing, because you have to, don't you?
One aspect of Everton's second half ascendency was down to the referee, Simon Hooper, taking Tarkowski's side in his reunion battle with Calvert-Lewin. Chances like that showed that our striker had the movement to beat his old teammate. But his old teammate was taking particular relish when he was allowed to throw his bestie on the ground.
The other was because Moyes was able to bring on Dewsbury-Hall and pair him with Ndiaye as a couple of tens, while Branthwaite made three at the back to ward off Calvert-Lewin and the wing-backs. "My mate Kiernan," from their Leicester days, as James Justin called Dewsbury-Hall. "He was very good and he was finding space in the pockets. I thought they were occupying the ten slots really well, and he made a big difference when he came on."
It didn't take long for momentum to swing, but it took Daniel Farke a long time to make any substitutions of his own. He said afterwards that he was thinking about it. "We didn't have a problem defending their processes," he pointed out, despite conceding so much possession. The same players had, "finished the last game with a clean sheet — we don't allow chances and defend really well in the last row." He saw no reason why they shouldn't keep defending well.
And only against Everton, too. Everton are 16th in the Premier League for expected goals and they underperform it. Their striker, Thierno Barry, says, "Every day my family sends me (messages of) people saying I am the worst striker." Jack Grealish has assisted six of their goals, sets up two shots per game, and has broken his foot. Given Leeds were leading, and that Everton's pressure wasn't getting them into the penalty area, Farke was happy to stick with the three at the back everybody likes Leeds to play these days. "If you take a centre-back out and risk to defend with a four-man formation, it would be madness at 1-0 up in this game," Farke went on, but, "It was something I was thinking about."
While he was thinking things over, Sebastiaan Bornauw had to block quick to stop Ndiaye, and Karl Darlow had to dive full length to stop Barry scoring from the edge of the area with the outside of his boot. Farke eventually came up with Ao Tanaka for the booked Gruev, while Moyes replaced the young right-back playing right-wingback with a young winger, Tyler Dibling, fit for the role. United sub Tanaka's contribution had been two passes, one straight out of play that screwed a counter. Then he let Gueye get too far away on his run from midfield to the corner, couldn't stop his low, slow cross, and Barry ran behind, around and in front of Bornauw on his way to flicking the ball past Darlow. He kept running directly to one of Everton's social media team behind the goal so they could film him going through six or seven separate goal celebrations.
"You see the critics, but I like to prove people wrong who have the wrong idea of me," was what he'd gone on to say about messages from people saying he's the worst striker. Which is something you can't exactly quantify if, as a football manager, you're trying to think up the best substitutions to win a match. David Moyes, for most of the season, has seemed to regard Barry and his non-scoring sidekick, Beto, as impositions on his good nature. "If you bring a no.9 in you want him to score," he said after this match, of his £27m summer signing. "His training is getting better, his levels are improving." How much of Farke's thinking was about Barry wanting to score just as much as Calvert-Lewin did — and the pre-game expectations about which centre-forward would be the story?
For Farke, the conundrum was more about trust and a bad case of not doing and being damned anyway. He could have used his bench earlier — Brenden Aaronson for one looked tired long before his manager's 85th minute triple-change freshened Leeds up. But his bench didn't have a Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall on it, or a Jarrad Branthwaite. And Aaronson, tired as he looked, had dutifully thrown all his first half attacking energy into a run-anywhere defensive performance for the second half, leading the team for attempted tackles since the interval. Who on the bench was going to do what a knackered Aaronson was still doing?
The conclusion of Farke's thoughts about making changes earlier was, essentially, that he trusted the players on the pitch to deal with Everton's new impetus and not let them score. And given that a point at Everton would be a decent result, that at worst they wouldn't let them score twice. Which was a close thing — Struijk's mistake, a couple of minutes after the equaliser, led to a scramble that ended with Gueye shooting against the bar.
But what was to be done about that? Struijk was on nobody's list of players that should have been substituted, yet he was almost the difference that meant defeat. Likewise, Tanaka is usually in everyone's preferred starting eleven, and his poor showing here might have helped put Farke off making more changes. A manager is entitled, after much thought, to leave the players who kept a clean sheet last week out there on the pitch and expect them to keep doing their jobs, i.e., not conceding to Thierno Barry.
And if their job is to come away from Everton with at least a point, then the players might also expect to be left out there to deal with things for as long as that point looks attainable. Farke is not an animated manager, and gets criticised by fans who want to see him doing, well, something — to see him performing the role of manager, a la Mikel Arteta at Arsenal, who has been spotted tearing out of his technical area towards opposition wingers. I can't help wondering whether that sort of performance isn't counter-productive: that players would rather feel like they're trusted to play one single blessed sideways pass without their boss gesturing and dancing and shouting at them what to do.
It's of an ilk with the injured-goalie timeouts that Eddie Howe and Pep Guardiola have popularised, and have football veering from a game of two halves to four quarters. Do they think their players are that thick that they can't work a game out unless it's stopped for a pitchside seminar? Premier League footballers are paid millions because they're supposed to be among the best in the world at playing this game. Should it always be up to a manager to hold their hands through holding onto a lead?
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Everton away might not have been perfect, but this was a better way of not-winning than Newcastle away, with more to build on than to bring down. There was always enough out there on the pitch for Farke to decide he could let the players who did so well last week bring a point home. Perhaps he could have made earlier changes and they'd have worked — without fail — and Leeds would have won all three points. But perhaps Calvert-Lewin could have put his golden first-half chance the right side of the post, and given his manager much less to think about in the second half. Or Tanaka could have been alert and stopped Gueye's cross, Bornauw could have held off Barry. Those are reasonable expectations, too, when you put players on the pitch. And so was a 1-1 draw, so on we go. ⭑彡
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