Leeds United 0-0 Newcastle United: In the know
The two games at Elland Road this season have been invitations to make and feel the difference in the place where it matters, where at its best it can be felt far beyond Beeston.
This game was shoved to last on Match of the Day, as it failed the national interest test on several levels. There were no goals, no flashpoints, no rants, and no prolonged VAR checks. Boring! Save it for insomniacs, as a medicinal treat.
I loved this game, though, and I'm content to keep Leeds United underground for the Leeds United fans, the connoisseurs and the weirdos, the people who got into this when it was good or bad and then got more into it when it got worse and couldn't explain why. Perhaps only because the squares don't understand.
This match felt to me like a palette cleanser, not only of all the grit and sticks stirred in with last week's paint, but from the last two seasons of Leeds United being really good at playing football matches. Daniel Farke's two Championship seasons were a high point in Elland Road contrarianism, of 56 games won and an aggregate of 176 goals to 73 being, somehow, boring. A question hovered throughout: did Farke enjoy possession for its own sake, or was the staleness a consequence of 46 games a season against cowardly chumps fending Leeds off with seven-at-the-back?
That, on top of the embarrassment, was one of the low thoughts after last Tuesday at Sheffield Wednesday: 80 per cent possession for one goal was the sort of thing we were supposed to be leaving behind. It doubled the worry from visiting Arsenal, when we were the seven-at-the-back chumps and were five goals' worth of bad at it, too.
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The joy of this goalless draw with Newcastle United was discovering that beating Everton the other week doesn't have to be a one-off, and Elland Road can and perhaps will host what a lot of fans have been hankering for since Farke got going: matches in which, because Leeds are not by far the better team, we get exciting contests that can go either way and spells of ascendance (raised in the opening game, when Nmecha scored, to transcendence) balanced by time spent beneath coshes when the Old Peacock Ground can be at its best. Nothing is going to come easy to Leeds United this season, particularly with this set of forwards, but even allowing for Arsenal-style write-offs winning on any day should never feel out of reach. More performances like this might even help Leeds face the Arsenal-style challenges with more confidence.
Farke flexed for this match and, as I search for ways he's learned from two Premier League relegations with Norwich City, I'm hoping this is one. He was rigid and slow to change Leeds in the Championship, but he had right to be, trusting that the squad's quality and his tactical erosion of defensive opponents would come right in the end. It did, to a 100 point tune, eventually. But in the Premier League Farke can not come to every game expecting a grand masterplan to work, so things had to change against the Geordies. The biggest change was starting Lukas Nmecha, and telling Lucas Perri to launch the ball long.
This was brave stuff because the Barcodes' backline, Fabian Schär, Sven Botman and Dan Burn, are built to mock United's summer of big lads. Nmecha is 6ft1in, same as Schär, but Botman at 6ft5in and Burn at 6ft6in should have put him in his place. But Nmecha took them on with wise manoeuvres, gently pushing back with his back to goal so an aerial duel could move to the ground, and with a long leg he kept sweeping the ball left or right for Dan James or Wilf Gnonto. Whichever defender he'd occupied now also had to turn, and they didn't like to turn.
James and Gnonto couldn't always make the most of getting the ball but that's where Sean Longstaff and Ilia Gruev were important. This is also where all those Kloppist press/counter-press tactics revert to the 1980s, as helped win the league for Leeds in 1992: long kick to Chapman, knocked down, Batty wins it, Strachan, McAllister, Speed and Wallace go play. We need two to do the work of David Batty these days but that's how good he was. Longstaff has had a slow adaptation in his short time at Leeds so far, picked out by Farke as a player who should be doing more but hasn't been able to get into the team as a reverse indication of his importance to this season: because more is expected of him, he has to give more. This game was always going to get more out of him, against the team, his boyhood one, that he left in tears this summer after twenty years.
"I’m under no illusions," he told The Times before the match. "It’s not a risk coming here but there’s a chance you get relegated. I was happy to take on that challenge. You want to be in the group and help the group understand it’s possible as long as everyone is together, and that is subs, starting players, everyone. You have to roll your sleeves up, fight and dig in — and even if it’s for a point, they all add up.
"There is also a competitor in me who says, 'I want to play against Sandro (Tonali), Joelinton and Bruno (Guimarães)'. They are three of the best players in the world in that position, but I want to show I can compete against top players in every team."
And it showed, and he did, moving in whenever a winger lost out to put Newcastle back in their half. He also seemed to raise Ilia Gruev's game, because good midfields are teamwork and Gruev was much, much better than his shadowchasing at Arsenal. Anton Stach is more of a curiosity. He has the size and demeanour of a box-to-box player like Patrick Vieira but, with Ao Tanaka injured, he was cast as the most forward facing midfielder and, like against Everton, looked as often like a second striker as the defensive midfielder he came listed as. What this means, practically, is a lot of time getting lost ahead of the ball when it'd be nice to see his 6ft4ness blocking Geordies in their path. Perhaps he'll move alongside Longstaff when Tanaka is fit.
Stach roaming behind the striker is also an obvious symptom of the Peacocks' obvious malaise: not much going on up top. Both Leeds and Newcastle made chances in the first half but the difference was that Newcastle looked more like scoring theirs and, even though they didn't, they had a big £69m man from Bremen sitting in the stands ready to. The second half was changed by workrate substitutions from Farke, using Brenden Aaronson and Jack Harrison for more warding off out wide than Gnonto or James had capacity left for, changes that then helped Dominic Calvert-Lewin, on for Nmecha, into some potentially matchwinning moments. Harrison showed his worth by spying a chance to intercept and turn defence into attack with a long pass onto Calvert-Lewin's boot — and off it again into goalie Nick Pope's hands. Calvert-Lewin was a touch more forthright a moment later when he took a loose ball, swayed around Bruno, and lashed a shot not very wide from 35 yards. Fair enough! Don't mind that at all.
There were late surges from Jayden Bogle, perhaps the one person reassured by Aaronson's presence and able to get more involved in attack. But much of the final stages of tension came from a dopeyness across the backline while Newcastle were at their coshingest and Leeds' players resolutely refused to clear. I was ready to rescind Longstaff's player of the match award when he took Stach's clearing header and stumbled in front of Livramento, so Joe Rodon had to stop a shot from Harvey 'six career goals against Leeds' Barnes. This was a continuation of a theme whose other highlight was Pascal Struijk laying off to Gruev in our penalty area, and Stach taking control just long enough to dribble twenty yards and get tackled.
Players, whatever the tactics, will often revert to their default settings and we had a little more of that in stoppage time from Harrison: beating Livramento by controlling a long ball with the sort of first touch that used to make me weep for happiness, he scampered along the byline like the old days looking to pull back for Klich, Hernandez, Tyler Roberts: instead he found the one defender in his way, Lewis Miley, who in 2019 when Harrison notched his first Leeds assist was twelve years old. I don't know why that specifically irks me but come on Jackie, you let a child read your book.
Never mind. Although obviously a lot of people do mind, and the transfer window closing and leaving us staring through double glazing at hordes of productive attacking players is making for a stressful start to autumn. But in some ways the stress is good. With four points from three games, and more specifically four points from the six that were realistically achievable, plus two clean sheets without even calling on Jaka Bijol yet, Leeds have proof that this season needn't end in relegation. And the two home performances are proof that this can be an enjoyable season, replacing the slow walkovers of the Championship with tense matches against peers that could and should get the best from Elland Road's fortress reputation.
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This wasn't a thriller for Match of the Day but the last twenty minutes in particular were a simple, good, end-to-end go-either-way football game, the sort of match that as a home supporter you can feel involved in. The lessening of booing about Jack Harrison coming on was, I think, less about fans warming up to him again, more about him coming into a game while the fans felt they had to — and importantly could — help the team. Football, especially in the Premier League, reduces fans too often to helpless gawping bystanders, and today's league-wide subjugation to Fabrizio Romano's will is one of the worst examples of supporters exerting and becoming exasperated by their digital futility in the hopes executives will burn millions on their behalf. But the two games at Elland Road this season have been invitations to make and feel the difference in the place where it matters, where at its best it can be felt far beyond Beeston. Not on Match of the Day, but by those who know they know. ⭑彡
More to Read at Leedsista since last time:
Tony Currie, first time: Arsenal vs Leeds United, August 1978 ⭑ Tony Currie was a symbol of the post-Revie transformation of Leeds United from a clinical winning machine to something more relaxed, and much less effective. Nicer hair, taller floodlights, no more trophies. But what Don Revie had drilled into his players, they now drilled into Tony Currie.
Fotherby on Tour: Faustino Asprilla ⭑ "I'd be very happy to join Leeds if the clubs can agree on a fee," said Asprilla, and knowing the player's willingness to come Fotherby was jetting off to Italy to do the deal not for £7m, not for £4m, but a bargain at £3.5m.
How Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Leeds United just might work ⭑ An experienced Premier League striker who has scored two consecutive seasons in double figures and played and scored for England, who just needs to stay fit and recover the form he showed under Carlo Ancelotti for the next few years to become the prime of his career — and he's free?
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