Leeds United 0-3 Wolverhampton Wanderers: Beatings Per Feeling
What Wolves do or don’t do, fairly or unfairly, isn’t our fight. "We have our own problems", as Radrizzani put it, and that's much more interesting. In fact it’s fascinating. And Radrizzani should find it engrossing, if this club is going to move forward the way he claims it will.
At least that’s now over, and some fairly extraordinary things will have to happen before we play a league match with this Wolverhampton Wanderers team again. This game had been looming, like a drifting juggernaut, inexorably filling the dash cam of our season. It hit us hard, but somehow we survived. So we’ll play Reading at the weekend, a very different game. And Wolves will play Manchester City next season, also a very different game.
In some ways it’s a relief that we won’t be taking this current version of Leeds United Football Club to the Etihad Stadium because, I mean, Christ, can you imagine. Not only the football, but the post game tweets; the UAE and Qatar don’t enjoy the best of relations, and Andrea Radrizzani might feel that loyalty to Ivan Bravo like a devil on his shoulder, encouraging him to spend the last ten minutes of the match composing futile protests on Twitter.
More of that later. First, we have to deal with the futility of the football match Leeds played with Wolves. The final score was 3-0 to Wolves, not as bad as many Leeds fans had feared, and better than many had hoped, but very much a dismissive cuff round the ear from a much more sophisticated opponent, just passing through. All Wolves' advantages off the pitch are fully expressed on it: they have quality players with a winning habit, who are enjoying being really good at football this season. When that happens, games like this are easy.
There were two positives for Leeds to cling to. First, the effort and work rate that was completely absent from the capitulation to Middlesbrough in the last game returned. They’d been there in the defeat of Brentford; Leeds were all about the second ball in that game, fighting for the win. That came back, but in a different and sad way: Leeds weren’t scrapping for victory, but to stay in the game.
Still, Adam Forshaw’s restoration had the desired effect; even when he makes a mistake and risks losing possession, he somehow finds a way to keep it, and he alone has instructions and corrections to yell at his teammates, encouraging them towards better play. I wouldn’t argue with Gaetano Berardi’s right to take the armband when Liam Cooper went off injured — after being floored at a corner by Gaetano Berardi — but Forshaw is consistently proving himself the best candidate over any other. Berardi, for his part, is maintaining a high minimum standard and looks bewildered by the drop of the players around him, so much so that he hit an exceptionally hard shot just wide of the Kop end goal, as if to demonstrate that if something didn’t start happening in the Leeds attack, he’d just start shooting himself.
What was happening in the Leeds attack was not much in the first half, and not much more in the second. Samu Saiz was playing deeper than I remember him back in the days when he was an angel from heaven, but all that did was put seven players between him and the goal when he refused to pass, instead of three. I don’t really blame Saiz for hogging the ball; I don’t think it’s selfishness. I think he starts each match with an ideal of how his intelligent sharp passing will create goals for his teammates, but then his teammates stare at his intelligent sharp passes as if they’re shopping trolleys rolling towards the bottom of a river, and Saiz gets it into his head that if Leeds are going to score, he’ll have to do it himself.
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