Leeds United 0-1 Sunderland: Tell-tale
Suddenly, the Championship's dread grudges resume beating under the floorboards. Next season could bring Millwall, Middlesbrough and Frank Lampard's Coventry together with Sunderland, all specific, irrational problems for Leeds United. Eight games you can afford to miss, right there.
Leedsista is entirely written by me, a human person, and entirely funded by people like you, Leeds fans, who think decent non-AI, non-clickbait writing about their football team is worth £3 a month to read or £5 a month to listen to the podcast version.
If you enjoy reading what I write, I hope you'll consider becoming a paying member to help keep it getting written.
Find out what you can get with a 30 day free trial:
This match was such a disorientating comedown after the exhilaration of playing Manchester City that, as I recover from 106 minutes of banging my head against a wall, the only helpful result is being reminded of where we are.
Perhaps we'd lost sight of that. Elland Road was angry, early, about Leeds United's retreat into patience against Sunderland, rather than the all out aggression of Saturday. Dominic Calvert-Lewin was trying to gee up the crowd from the middle of the first half, trying to get them back behind the team, but the Peacock Ground had also retreated into the stubborn schism of the Championship days. The players should, the crowd felt, be easily beating Sunderland.
Sunderland, however, have been awful opponents since Leeds went down to the Championship in 2023. A 1-0 defeat at their place. A dreadful 0-0 at Elland Road when Leeds couldn't break them down and were denied a clear penalty for handball against Luke O'Nien. We went back to Wearside for Illan Meslier's night of the haunted bounce, then at least got some joy at Elland Road when Pascal Struijk saved a night of grind.
And nothing changed against them in the Premier League, when the opportunity of playing them while half the team was at Afcon was squandered because the one player who wasn't good enough to go scored. Simon Adingra has been so bad for them otherwise that they've already loaned him out, six months after buying him. Remember: Garry Monk's record against Marcelo Bielsa was three wins and a draw. Sometimes football moves in ways we can't explain.
Read the whole history
4.8/5 on Amazon, 1,400 reviews | 4.6/5 on Goodreads, 282 reviews
'A sports book that left me reading under the lamplight at 1am and begging for more at the end of every chapter. Unheard of'
Leeds have got themselves up to 15th in the Premier League so thoughts of relegation have been receding, thoughts of a top half finish increasing, and the fact Sunderland are having a better season than us became a pre-match irrelevance. Such giddiness is dangerous. Seasons ebb and flow, through good form and bad form, and United's target remains 17th. Last season, Tottenham finished 17th while losing 22 matches. Leeds, so far, have lost twelve. We're due ten more defeats yet. Fortunately there are only nine games left.
There could be more nights like this between now and the end of the season and everything could still be absolutely fine. Perhaps this defeat is a well-timed reminder that this season, from first kick to last, is a relegation battle, and those are not supposed to be fun. Even beating Sunderland wouldn't have removed all the risk from the games ahead. The next nine are going to be painful, but probably ultimately fine.
This match, initially, was going fine. Daniel Farke went with his now habitual line-up of defensive names playing attacking football. It was roughly the same as at Newcastle and Everton, the teamsheets showing eight nominally defensive players, the first halves of both those games being some of the best attacking football of the season.
Farke's theory is about players who can do both, and in Gabriel Gudmundsson, Jayden Bogle and James Justin he has three players who can attack dangerously, like Wilf Gnonto or Dan James might, but then defend resolutely the way Gnonto or James can't. Watching Gudmundsson and Bogle tearing into Sunderland's penalty area, Gudmundsson sending O'Nien spinning as he beat him to the byline again, didn't make this feel like a defensive team.
That was the opening twenty minutes, though. To that point Leeds had 77 per cent possession, 90 per cent of passes on point, a couple of shots, some promising situations. They should have had a penalty when Luke O'Nien took Pascal Struijk down under a corner with a high rugby tackle around his neck. United were taking advantage of a big Granit Xhaka shaped hole in Sunderland's midfield to press them and push them back, and scoring that penalty would have rewarded their start and forced the Black Cats into chasing the game.
Instead the Black Cats called a tactical timeout and decided to call the game off. I'm not sure why their manager Regis Le Bris needed his goalie to fake an injury so he could gather the players together and tell them to switch into timewasting mode, other than as a statement of how the game was going to go from that point.
LUFCData has posted a breakdown of the agony that ensued. Playing time of 50m49s from the 106 minutes we suffered through. There were 105 stoppages — one a minute — and twelve precious minutes of our lives were wasted while Sunderland took their throw-ins and goal-kicks. The longest the ball stayed in play, all night, was two minutes and one second.
There is a fantasy land where a more attack-minded Leeds team simply swashbuckle their way through Sunderland and win an actual and moral victory for good football and nice nights out. But it's the same fantasy land where Manchester City's £500m team carve Leeds up on Saturday and win 5-0, where Arsenal aren't relying on two corners to take a 2-0 lead at Elland Road. Sunderland's discipline extended from their timewasting and running the referee to man-to-man marking and blocking off every passing opportunity.
Leeds had their own role to play in this, and I can't account for them spending twenty minutes of the second half trying to move the ball off the right wing other than to say there was nowhere else that Sunderland were leaving space to put it. You could argue for a more progressive passing midfielder, but progress where, pass to who? Sunderland suffocated everything after adding Granit Xhaka from the bench.
When Farke tried changing it, bringing Lukas Nmecha on for Ilia Gruev, Leeds promptly conceded. As happened within a minute of Joel Piroe coming on against Arsenal, and soon after two changes against Nottingham Forest, and as soon as Noah Okafor came on against Chelsea. It's no wonder he's so wary about making substitutions. It's a pattern Leeds could do with changing.
Leeds did do this a bit differently by putting the ball in the net first. It was a shame this goal didn't stand because it was the night's one moment of beauty: a powerful, inswinging free-kick by Anton Stach meeting Joe Rodon's head and pinging in off the cross bar. The ball travelled in blink-time, so the noise it made was the signal it was in. And Joe Rodon's guilty face, as he came out of the initial celebrations, was the signal he'd been offside.
Another thing Leeds could work on: they're too honest. It's a virtue but it's worthless in this league. The ref didn't need VAR for this, he just had to look at Big Joe confessing to Stach. There was no pressure on him to check what O'Nien had done to Struijk earlier because hardly any players protested. And when the ball went up the other end after the goal was disallowed and bounced off Ampadu's hand, and he swung his hand at it again, the overall reaction of Leeds players was, well, fair enough.
I'm not sure it was fair enough. Both O'Nien on Struijk and Ampadu's handball contravened rules designed to make sure soccer isn't rugby. Only one of them involves smashing a pair of arms around an opponent's head and neck, though, and it wasn't the one the ref took action over. Ampadu only endangered the health of his own team and fans. As indeed did Karl Darlow. After two excellent saves against Manchester City on Saturday, this whole night was summed up when Habib Diarra's spot-kick was hit straight at him, and he dived and deflected it up into the goal.
There were twenty minutes of normal time left, plus twelve the referee added on, plus as many attackers as Farke could send forward chasing an equaliser. But it was never happening. Gnonto sent dipping crosses into the box, James zipped the ball low through the six yard area, but Calvert-Lewin has been reading these slowly lately. Joe Rodon's honesty extended to standing on the right wing, the ball at his toes, telling his teammates he had no idea what to do next.
Karl Darlow was begging to be allowed forward for set-pieces but Farke kept telling him no, perhaps just for how it would have looked. I remember Illan Meslier trying to score an equaliser at Chelsea, at the start of March 2023 when Javi Gracia had just arrived, being a bad sign of the panic engulfing the club. Farke would rather style out a defeat than let such a desperate mood overtake Leeds now. 1.07 points per game is still where he wants Leeds to be, heading with that for a total of forty.
Leedsista newsletter
Free, independent writing about Super Leeds in your inbox
Afterwards, Le Bris said he had motivated his players with the memory of last season's defeat at Elland Road. Which feels odd, given how all the other recent games between us have gone well for them. But that's a reminder of how suddenly the Championship's dread grudges can resume beating at you from under the floorboards. The Premier League might be glamour and big matches and exciting players. But next season it could well be Millwall, Middlesbrough and Frank Lampard's Coventry, three teams that together with Sunderland will be specific, irrational problems for Leeds United. That's eight games you can afford to miss, right there. ⭑彡
New! Hoodies! Money off mugs!
Free members of Leedsista can get £1 off a Leedsista mug (as many times as they like. Paying members can get £2 off. If that's you, check your emails for the codes — if you wish that was you, you can join Leedsista by clicking here.