Leeds United 3-1 Chelsea: Earning the right to stop the future
Elland Road is still capable of neutralising the future. The game Howard Wilkinson grew up in still has to be played, first and foremost: players have to earn the right to play.
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Leeds United used a new formation and Chelsea couldn't cope. Was that it? Chelsea have coped with 3-5-2 or 5-3-2 before. Just a couple of months ago they won 2-1 away against Michael Skubala's version of it at Lincoln City. So there.
Admittedly they only drew 2-2 with a five-back'd Brentford in September, but then they beat Ange Postecoglou's misshapen Nottingham Forest 3-0. (The Tricky Trees are sturdier oaks now Sean Dyche is there.) Chelsea also beat Wolves 3-0, who were sticking with 5-3-2 after Vítor Pereira had introduced it against Fulham, lost 3-0, and got sacked. Last season Enzo Maresca's side despatched Barrow 5-0 and Southampton 5-1, and Brentford 2-1.
It takes more than a formation. Daniel Farke was right at the weekend, saying that if 3-5-2 was guaranteed to upset Manchester City then everyone would do it and always win. And he was right before playing Chelsea to say, "It's not like the manager deserves praise, (it should be) always the players. Because it doesn't work like FIFA or PlayStation, you just change the formation and everything works ... You can have an idea as a manager, but more important is the execution on the pitch."
So if it's about more than where we put the players on the pre-match graphic, what did we learn from the way our Peacocks lopped these Lions' heads off? We learned that Leeds United's half-and-a-game new look is about facing some facts beyond formations.
That if the team is going to be defending, it might as well defend with more defenders instead of wingers trying to track back — especially if the full-backs have the positive-minded and very wingy characteristics of Jayden Bogle and Gabriel Gudmundsson.
That some skillsets are easier to use at the bottom of the Premier League than others. Can Wilf Gnonto show his flair against some of the best defenders in the world? Can a Jack Harrison cross evade top class centre-backs? Could the much-missed mythical attacker who didn't arrive in summer twinkle technically through the strongest defences in top level football? It hasn't looked likely, so far. According to the stats, Gnonto has attempted fourteen take-ons in this season's Premier League and succeeded once. It's a hard league for anyone less than the best.
That it's easier, assuming the players are committed to the cause, to use strength and guile to stop world class players from playing. That instead of keeping the ball and trying to do things with it, increasing the likelihood of a mistake in possession among your not-so-good players, you can let the better team have the ball but make their life incredibly difficult. Jose Mourinho is nodding along to this.
Facing up to those facts has been a more significant change to Leeds United in the last two games than changing the formation. Before Wednesday night Leeds had at least 40 per cent possession in each of their home games, trying to impose themselves with the ball at Elland Road. Against Chelsea that dropped to 29 per cent and they imposed themselves in a different way.
Bogle set the tone in the first ninety seconds, tackling Marc Cucurella in his own penalty box then whipping his arms to the South Stand as if it was stoppage time in an FA Cup quarter-final. Joe Rodon held his own mini celebration after chasing Jamie Gittens away from goal but had to cut it short because the ball was actually still in play (he's an excitable chap, Big Joe).
Gudmundsson had such a good time against 'generational talent' Estêvão that, after taking the ball off him yet again, the teenage winger swung around and swung a petulant leg to trip him. Three days after Carlo Ancelotti said his Brazil team "has to take advantage of this talent" at the World Cup this summer, Maresca took him off at half-time. "I think the feeling with Estêvão was a little bit, 'welcome to the Premier League, welcome to Leeds'," Maresca said afterwards.
That was the attitude of Leeds United's players from one to sixteen, to the point that within five minutes of coming on as a sub, Noah Okafor was chasing down and tackling both Tosin Adarabioyo and goalie Robert Sánchez in their six yard box and giving Dominic Calvert-Lewin what ESPN reported was 0.9913's worth of expected goal. (Don't worry, he scored.)
Working backwards, United's second goal was made by the striker Okafor replaced, Lukas Nmecha, picking the ball off a Chelsea toe, and Bogle sprinting to overtake two defenders and slip the loose ball to Ao Tanaka. He, twenty yards out, took a touch and walloped it low and hard and into the corner. It was a sensational hit, for a sensational 2-0 lead at half-time. The first goal had been a peach of its kind, too: an Anton Stach corner swinging in towards the front post, meeting Jaka Bijol's late run and his big strong head. Who says set pieces can't be aesthetic? This was a gorgeous goal.
Chelsea were allowed, just once, to Chelsea. Their side of the possession caused a lot of anxiety in Beeston but little else, because stout defending turned the ball into a useless lump unless a Leeds player had it. But after changing the left side in dismay at how well Gudmundsson was playing, Chelsea began the second half with some new concepts in quality. Liam Delap had got nothing from Pascal Struijk in the first half so he now made himself Bijol's problem. That didn't mean he got much more, but it forced Struijk into marking half-time sub Pedro Neto and chasing him deep into the other half. That made Gudmundsson's life harder, and when he lost the ball high and Struijk couldn't stop Neto passing over halfway, Chelsea put their foot down until the ball, via Gittens beating Bogle, Gudmundsson getting lost at the back post and Lucas Perri getting beaten at his near post, was in the net, courtesy of Neto.
Scoring had looked inevitable from the moment Gudmundsson lost the ball because you can sense, sometimes, when a team of quality players is switching on to a moment of danger. But rather than worry about the way Chelsea pulled Leeds apart in that move, praise Leeds that Chelsea only looked like doing that once.
When you have a team of players who are not as good, objectively, as the other players, this is what credit looks like. That Gudmundsson and Struijk worked their problems out. That although Bogle struggled to cope with substitute Alejandro Garnacho, Garnacho still wasn't allowed to do anything important. That although after Cole Palmer came on he was given one chance to shoot, the rest of the time Ethan Ampadu, helped by Ilia Gruev coming on for Tanaka, marked him out of the game.
And Chelsea couldn't cope. There's a side to them that, with six red cards this season, opponents can play on. Estêvão could have gone for his foul on Gudmundsson. Cucurella tried starting on Bogle off the ball. Neto wouldn't leave the lino alone. A moment in the last ten minutes summed them up when Gudmundsson, Struijk and Ampadu flew into hard but fair tackles on halfway and João Pedro seemed to take it as an invitation to try snapping Gruev's leg. Chelsea don't seem to understand the parameters of football's physical side so when they're not cowering from it they're taking it several notches too far.
More than changing the shape, it's getting a Leeds team on the pitch that understands and relishes aggression that has changed the last two matches. Curiously, that was at issue in The Guardian's Monday morning story about Daniel Farke's future. 'Some at the club', wrote Matt Hughes, 'have raised questions about the quality of the players he brought in with accusations he favoured physicality over technical quality.'
If that's true, 'some at the club' got some answers in this match. It was an odd night in some ways. Unwelcome part-owners Red Bull were in full 'commercial activation' mode with new banner advertising on the back of the north-west corner, Dougie Lampkin doing a demo of his Junior Kickstart trail bike skills outside the East Stand before the game, and a DJ fist-pumping to the beat from the roof of a branded car, keeping pedestrian flow moving outside the Kop gates as people tried to get out of earshot. Contrasting with that was Howard Wilkinson striding across the pitch at half-time to accept an induction into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame that he characteristically described, in a word, as "Embarrassing".
And we also had Leeds United versus Chelsea. An underrated part of this rivalry's beginnings is that Chelsea were the opponents in United's first ever appearance on Match of the Day, in 1964. So the first time Leeds fans saw their team on national television they saw Eddie McCreadie kicking John Giles out of the game, and Don Revie coming onto the field to supervise a stretcher and a blanket as he was taken away. They saw how in the second half McCreadie and Ron 'Chopper' Harris took turns on Jimmy Greenhoff until he, too, was reduced to a hobbling passenger, before nineteen-year-old Harris turned his attention to Billy Bremner. This was unwise. After the film showed how two bad hacks had Bremner staring Harris down twice, the camera caught Bremner taking his next chance for a leap at Chopper's knees that didn't miss.
That match set the tone between the players — it was Harris and Bremner's first meeting, but not their last — but also between the fans, as television gave an audience beyond the 38,000 jostling for a distant, smoggy view from the terraces of Stamford Bridge a clearer, close-up view of all that went on. Even the idlest Leeds fan going to work on Monday must have been talking about that thug McCreadie, every Londoner with an interest in Chelsea about Bremner's revenge.
You can still feel that, and all of the sixty years since, in football games. It feels like the sport's basic principles will be bigly tested in the USA section of this summer's World Cup, but for now Elland Road is still capable of neutralising the future. The DJs and the stunt bikes can't get onto the actual pitch. The 'generational talents' in Chelsea's billion pound squad could hardly manage it either. The game Howard Wilkinson grew up in still has to be played, first and foremost: players have to earn the right to play.
Leeds United have, in December, perhaps landed on a way of neutralising what was feeling to some like an inevitable future of relegation. We might ask Daniel Farke what took so long. Or we could ask whoever was leaking from the boardroom to The Guardian against his favouring 'physicality over technical quality'. If that person wants to keep having that argument they'll have the entire modern history of Leeds United's support coming down against them, flinging DVDs of the 1970 FA Cup final. Whatever frippery the sponsors and the PSR-pliant transfer fees tried influencing this game with will be forgotten within hours. A football match like this, whatever the season holds, will always be remembered. ⭑彡
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