Leeds United 1-2 Aston Villa: Always something new to sell

Leedsista Libre

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I've been reading my writing out loud on a podcast for subscribers since 2017, and Leedsista Libre is a free podcast that will dip weekly into the archives to republish some of those old recordings for free.

This week's episode goes back to 2019, when Aston Villa came to Elland Road and Mateusz Klich scored the fairest goal of them all.

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A two part dive into the deep history of Elland Road.

The Peacocks are called The Peacocks because there's a Peacock pub on Elland Road. But why was there a pub called The Peacock on Elland Road — let alone two? Let's investigate.

Part one, answering these questions: why a peacock, why Islington, and why Elland Road?

And part two, about who was behind The New Peacock Inn, and what was their connection to The Old Peacock?

This was a much better Leeds United performance than any of their games away, and a better home game than the defeat to Spurs or the win over West Ham. There was commitment and effort, Jayden Bogle thundering into tackles, a 1-0 lead taken in a scramble, Aston Villa matched shot for shot — Leeds had one more on target — and near enough pass for accurate pass.

When Villa imposed their obvious greater quality after equalising at the start of the second half, Leeds defended vigorously and kept the home crowd involved. They were helped in that by referee Robert Jones, who always makes his free-kicks impossible to predict, provoking the terraces into howling protest. Delight had come within tantalising reach when Leeds went ahead, and at 1-1, Elland Road felt united in desire to taste the remaining joy of a draw.

After going behind, Leeds were denied an equaliser by the Video Assistant Referees, perverting football with their cameras: if the ball did touch Dominic Calvert-Lewin's hand on its way into the net, it did so merely. Far from a 'clear and obvious' error VAR was meant to solve, this was televisual overreach, using cameras to scan the pitch for microscopic infractions nobody would care about if they weren't replayed with slow-motion magnification. This goal would have stood on any given day of most of the last 150 years of football, and the game was never the poorer for that.

Leeds were also denied an equaliser in one exceptional moment, in the 88th minute, when an outstanding header by Pascal Struijk was saved by World Cup winning goalkeeper Emi Martinez. This chance gains from seeing the replays, to watch Sean Longstaff crossing a free-kick to the edge of the six yard box, Struijk rising above Morgan Rogers and hanging in the air as the ball descends onto his forehead, tensing and releasing his neck muscles at the perfect moment of contact and directing the ball powerfully down, powerfully into the corner, kept out by the reading and reflexes of an excellent goalkeeper. It was great play by everybody, unfortunately.

United were behind by then due to a few key moments of less than great play. They'd dominated the first half but started the second looking unprepared for the impact of two substitutions and presumably lots of shouting by Unai Emery at half-time. The team was moving slowly while Villa chipped a free-kick down their right, and Noah Okafor was a long way behind substitute Donyell Malen when he took a pass from Matty Cash, behind Gabriel Gudmundsson, into the box. Not only was Okafor late, he was foolish, catching Malen but then slowing and putting his hands behind his back as if to avoid handballing his cross. For that to be a factor, though, Malen would have had to halt, turn, and whack the ball back towards his own goal, because Okafor was nowhere near blocking his square cross to Morgan Rogers at the front post.

Villa's second goal came from conceding a free-kick that could only be objected to, tactically, if we object that trying to withstand the pressure from a top four team increases the likelihood of mistakes by a bottom three team. Simply, the united defensive effort was undermined because Gudmundsson slipped. Struijk, who seems to be always taking bookings for bailing out others' mistakes, had to stop Ross Barkley on the edge of the box. The free-kick, then, had to be blocked by the wall Lucas Perri built in front of him, but to do that the wall had to jump as one. Joe Rodon was a head short of heading Rogers' dipping shot, and Perri was flatfooted behind him.

Farke had already, at 1-1, been trying to find the new impetus fans had wanted while the team was defending. Brenden Aaronson was having his usual game, undoing his best work with his habitual worst traits for holding on to the ball too long. He moved inside when Dan James came on, and as a reminder that even popular players have their quirks, James was later up to his own bad habit of cutting in from the right, ignoring the attackers around him, and whacking a shot over the bar.

Before that, though, James was involved in the instant reply to going behind as from the kick-off Rodon sent the winger running and he followed the ball into the penalty area, hitting it across and in from a narrow angle, only finding out much later that Calvert-Lewin was being penalised for growing up in a pre-VAR era of getting anything on the ball to get it in. Trade the fun of football for five minutes watching a referee taking a call on his Bluetooth headset, then find some other bystander in a big coat and blame him for everything.

Farke, blamed, met the cries for changes by bringing on Wilf Gnonto and Joel Piroe and sending Leeds attacking with some purpose. Gnonto's play expressed the frustration you hope turns into fuel when he's been out of the team for so long, and kept out of this game for so long. Struijk's header could have helped a lot, if it had gone in.

Post-match frustration wasn't helped by Daniel Farke remaining, probably rightly, unemotionally committed to the long-term at Leeds. He sees his role as remaining calm while passions rage from game to game, because regardless of the near-hand fixture list he thinks he can see a way to the target. 'We need six more wins and a few draws to stay up,' he was saying after this game. 'We still have home games against everyone around us to come. We have enough (in the team) to get the points we need to stay up.'

The target set in advance of the season was to get Leeds into 16th place, with 17th likely an acceptable outcome, after playing every other team twice. Would that be success? Given it was too difficult for the last six teams that came up from the Championship and tried, it must be. So Farke's fixation on May is a sensible way forward, of trying to protect his players from the inevitable reactions that come when success can include, according to 17th placed Spurs in last season's table, losing 22 times. The problem with taking another fifteen defeats' worth of attention on himself, though, is that modern football is not designed to allow a manager to take that much flak.

There was a deep irony to last week's calls for sacking Daniel Farke and tempting Marcelo Bielsa back to Leeds, because they were inspired by a rousing press conference in which Bielsa made a clear and passionate case against sacking managers like Daniel Farke.

"That's a product of the world we live in," Bielsa said. "In other words: 'this doesn't work, so we have to change it'. That way you can sell something new. There is another possibility. What is it? (It is) If the work we are doing still needs time to mature, to be refined, to be perfected, to be convincing, to find small nuances."

Bielsa's response to being offered the Leeds job would probably be to say Farke should be given more time to work on getting more out of the work he's doing. To chide modern football for not having patience, for always selling the unknown 'something new' as the answer for everything.

But against that possibility, modern football has been restructured so much that sacking and replacing a manager is essentially the only option clubs have left. Every other resource a club could turn to has been lopped off, one by one. First there is the glaring media focus on managers above all else. Head coaches are grilled for up to an hour before and after every game while a player might do a three minute chat after one game in ten, so it's no wonder they take an outsized place in conversations about matches where they don't even kick the ball. Then there's the overloaded fixture schedule that means the days between games are devoted to the rest players need rather than tactical work.

One of the most significant changes, I think, has been the introduction of transfer windows. Back in the day, when a club was struggling after a difficult start to the season, the obvious move was panic-shopping. If the manager couldn't get enough out of the players, you got him some different players. In the 1990s, this worked against Leeds, when Blackburn plucked David Batty away in late October 1993. But David O'Leary was able to respond to injury crises by splashing out for Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Keane in November and December 2000. For better or worse, Tomas Brolin, Seth Johnson and Robbie Fowler were autumn signings, too, but at least that was exciting. Buying and selling players was a valid part of a manager's skill set, something they could try and be judged on before facing the sack. It still feels like a more fan friendly way of reacting to adversity. Instead of a new man in a suit or tracksuit to berate along the sidelines, fans get the exciting hope of a new player to watch.

Profit & Sustainability Rules have also worked against that option so that when it comes November and the team is in the bottom three, boardrooms have little help to offer a current manager and nothing they can show the fans, apart from a new manager. And, again, forces beyond the dugout are dictating the incumbent's career. There was more lassitude for the long term, more taste for slowly building, back when football was cheap enough both in person and on television to reflect all a club can guarantee: that, for buying a ticket, you'll see a game of football. Fans are charged so much now that they have to see more than a game. They have to see their team win that game, the one thing no club, not even Manchester City, can guarantee. Sacking a manager is the one way a boardroom can justify keeping its prices high. The owners might be taking your money, but they have to demonstrate it's not their fault when fans don't get what they want. Managers might be getting twice as long in work if tickets were half the price.

Which is what dismays me about the apparent inevitability of Daniel Farke walking towards his sacking. It's not through any great admiration or enjoyment of Farke personally. It's from my increasingly desperate desire for football to be something more than a feedback loop of angry resentment tightening around usually the least interesting person out there, the guy at the side in a coat, to the detriment of thinking anything about the rest of the game I persistently try to enjoy watching without prejudging as the one experience I can begin without knowing what the next ninety minutes will bring. The dullwit stomp of social media has made icons from pictures of corner flags, static photos of static poles prized in a sport loved once for its ceaseless movement. The game seems to be trying very hard to trade all that away for the predictable routine of a bizarrely furious careers fair, but I'm still clinging to Struijk heading and Martinez saving for a thrill given to me in the midst of all the grim, heedless anger. ⭑彡