Leeds United 3-0 Norwich City: Weekend off
I'm content for Joel Piroe to pop up on a weekend like this, when we had much to fear, and finish off a move and a game with the nonchalance we needed to get over the rut we were getting in.
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Don Revie sometimes felt his Leeds team were cursed in their attempts to emulate Real Madrid, and this rainsoaked Madrid night of 2001 felt eerily familiar, of being a game beyond Leeds United's control.
One of the ways Daniel Farke's Leeds United team have begun surprising me is in their growing capacity to avoid the sort of surprises that no longer surprise Leeds United fans, which are the surprises we tend to get, i.e. the bad surprises.
Following a campaign of winning football with limp defeat to Southampton in the play-off final at Wembley didn't really shock anyone. Giving Sheffield Wednesday their one moment of fun this season in the League Cup merited plenty of knowing eyerolls. Fluffing a great chance of making an FA Cup quarter-final while completing a week of three home defeats by collapsing in front of Daniel Farke's former club? You could see it coming. And now the match is in the rear view mirror, and so are Norwich City. And that's quite surprising.
It's hard to say how much of United's capacity for unpleasant non-shockery is truly behind us until we've negotiated the inevitability of drawing Port Vale in the next round of the cup. Burslem are the team every Leeds fan should despise for lobbying behind the scenes to steal Leeds City's place in the Football League in 1919, although while I still insist they should have been thrown out of league football before they ever got in I suppose as its an FA-organised competition they do have the right to be in the FA Cup. They do not, however, have the right to beat Leeds United in it, which is not to say they won't, but that's what we were thinking about Norwich this weekend.
But since the Wednesday debacle Leeds have been showing more aptitude for clamping down doom before it grows. I think that has come with the team's transition to living with the different sort of doom you get at the bottom of the Premier League rather than the top of the Championship. Winning is a habit and it's a mentality, the clichés say, so what happens when, after losing only fourteen league games in two seasons, this season the team has already lost twelve?
It either does or doesn't learn to cope with weeks like this, when Fortress Elland Road is conquered twice in four days, when the gap to 18th closes from six points to three, when the dark arts of unfairness have swirled around Beeston for days and a giantkilling would make it feel a long time gone since feeling any winning. Because there is no escaping Premier League survival's shadow of necessity this match was important for saving the mood, before going to Crystal Palace, from its pessimistic momentum.
Which is not to say that everything is fine now, but is to say that Farke acted sensibly by starting Ethan Ampadu in this match. He played in defence, then midfield in the later stages, and Farke could have stuck him up front if necessary. What was necessary was that he played, as a guarantor of Leeds' performance. The previous round at Birmingham might have been easier had he played from the start. That's captains for you.
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Along with Gabriel Gudmundsson, Ampadu made sure that changing the other nine didn't leave Leeds altogether lost. It looked a little like that at first, after looking a lot like that at Birmingham, the auditioning reserves performing an underrehearsed version of what the first team does, mixed with their fading memories of the last time they were in the team.
It helped that while Leeds didn't look familiar with their plan, Norwich didn't seem to have one. Their reaction to Gudmundsson's goal, United's second, involved a lot of agonised arm flinging when it might have been easier to react to Gudmundsson being unmarked in their area to cleverly prod a loose ball away from the goalie. And it would have been easier to understand if Norwich had been doing anything to suggest they were in the game. Going 2-0 down didn't exactly cut off the Canaries' route to victory. Their first half of milling aimlessly around had done that.
Once Leeds had got over their initial unfamiliarity with each other they eased Norwich out of the game before half-time. Two goals were disallowed, one because Wilf Gnonto shouldered the ball past their outrushing keeper, one because he was offside when he headed in Dan James' cross-shot. Other chances might have been given to Leeds had Norwich been punished for playing VAR roulette in the penalty area. Shoves, pulls and trips were all checked and cleared and the referee, Darren England, seemed tempted into having the battle with the home crowd that Norwich City weren't up to.
Sean Longstaff broke the deadlock after half an hour, a sensible time to score a ludicrous goal. There are two wonderful parts to this. First is the way Gudmundsson took the ball to the byline, where the Norwich defenders were so convinced he couldn't catch it they were claiming for the corner. Gudmundsson didn't just catch it, he almost overtook it with a yard to spare, and flicked it behind him towards the six yard box. Now for part two, the flick of flicks, as Longstaff had the space to go full Frank Worthington. He turned to tee the ball up behind himself, then pirouetted south again to catch it on the volley. All lovely surprises, these, Gudmundsson catching Norwich unawares with his speed, Longstaff catching everyone unawares by not being the sort of player who is supposed to be scoring short-range spectaculars.
The 2-0 lead meant the bogginess of the second half didn't matter, other than as a way of assessing who from this line-up can come into United's Premier League team and reignite the climb towards safety. Jaka Bijol looked as solid at the back as he's proven himself to be in the league. His absence seems to be due to James Justin's tactical flexibility from centre-back. Sebastiaan Bornauw's absence is due to his confirmed status as a nice trustworthy reserve. Lucas Perri was given only the easiest shots to save, so pulled off one of his somersaulting long throws just for the heck of it, and that was fun.
Wilf Gnonto looked lively and ready to be Brenden Aaronson's first reliever when skills are required up top, while Dan James looked in need of more matches and more players who can read his crosses before he's back to his best. Longstaff, despite his goal, has a tendency to turn his midfield battles into scraps he doesn't always win: it might be preferable sometimes to the way Anton Stach comes late to the scene of the action, but somehow Stach seems able to dominate even when he's bypassed.
Ao Tanaka is the one we're all rooting for, and what he could add is a braver length of passing. He'll stick the ball out to the wings as soon as look at them. But it was hard to say whether it was rusty or inherent whenever he gave the ball away to Norwich close to our goal. His passing average in this match was 83 per cent, which is roughly his average for the season, while Ilia Gruev keeps ticking along at 90. In the Premier League, where a mistake equals a goal, Gruev keeps making the case that's he the way Leeds get a point while Tanaka is the man for three or none.
Up front, while we fretted through January about a £40m back-up for Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Lukas Nmecha continues quietly to be the dream. Seven starts, six Premier League goals, and a pleasant enjoyment in and dedication to his work and status. With five minutes left he was the unselfish creator of United's third after cutting inside Norwich's scattered defence and making room for a 20 yard shot. Instead he passed to Joel Piroe.
What a goal! Piroe is the enigma of this team, a deep-lying striker who could be Don Revie crossed with Harry Kane if he could only find a way of imposing himself on games. Instead he drifts, he drops, he strokes the ball around, then he loses it. Then he gets the ball twenty yards out and with barely any backlift he shoots off the top of the bar. Then he gets it again a few minutes later, the pass from Nmecha this time, and has he controlled it and shot? No. You need a replay to work out what he's done. When other players might have brought it under, he's opened up his body and used his left foot to clip the ball first time across and around the goalkeeper into the far bottom corner. The highest praise I can give to this finish is that it was like watching David Batty pass wide to Tony Dorigo. It was delivered with the same confidence that was Batty's trademark, by a player who hasn't hit the net for almost a year. You wouldn't know it.
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Perhaps that's the true respite of this match, and the cup this season. A skilful goal like that isn't what we're getting from the dogfight to stay in the Premier League, and Piroe hasn't looked like the player for that fight either. But nor has he complained about not playing, or used this moment to 'send a message' to the manager about pushing for a place. Piroe seems very content to be part of things at Leeds, and possibly part of Suriname's bid for World Cup qualification, alongside Jay-Roy Grot. And I'm content for him to pop up on a weekend like this, when we had much to fear, and finish off a move and a game with the nonchalance we needed to get over the rut we were getting in. ⭑彡
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