Leeds United 3-3 Liverpool: Making a point
Celebrating the draws like wins is the way you get, one day, to celebrate the wins like wins. And to celebrate the draws, you have to win them. If Leeds United's players understand that, and it looks like they do, they have a great chance of staying up this season.
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Leeds fans got two games for the price of one from Liverpool's visit to Elland Road. One way of experiencing this hard earned point was through 100 burdensome minutes of outmatching football against the Premier League champions, while the Peacocks tried to keep a grip on the game during hard times when their opponents were keeping more than 80 per cent of possession.
The other way of experiencing it deleted all that and made every minute of the hundred wonderful. A cross to the back post, some deflections, a calm controlled shot bounced into the net by Ao Tanaka. All the night's hard work by both teams meant nothing as the game ended the way it began, scores level, except for what all that hard work did for the people watching: it made a moment that made most of them there deliriously happy.
Before the season started I suspected Leeds United's problems were going to be about self-esteem. This is United's fourth promotion to the top flight since 1964, and the previous three have all sent Leeds to the top of the table and into battle with, specifically, Liverpool, who each time Leeds have come up have been the reigning champions.
This is not Leeds United's first promotion...
Relive the glories of 2020 and 1990 — and 1964, 1956, 1932, 1928 and 1924, too.
Elland Road's first top flight match of the Don Revie era was a 4-2 win over the title holders. A few weeks later Leeds lost 2-1 at Anfield and close battle was resumed at Wembley in May, the Reds edging a tense FA Cup final in extra-time. In 1990/91 Howard Wilkinson's team was beaten 3-0 away on New Year's Day, but put on a glorious second half at Elland Road in April to turn a 4-0 deficit into what should have been a 5-5 draw, if Lee Chapman hadn't been penalised for a mild collision with the goalkeeper. In 2020 Marcelo Bielsa's first Premier League game was a loud arrival at Anfield, a 4-3 defeat that did Leeds more credit than the champions. At Elland Road the following April, as fans protested against the European Super League, Diego Llorente's 87th minute equaliser was a blow against greed.
What Leeds have never done, post-war, is what felt like their unavoidable fate this season, flipping from a top-flight promotion in spring to a relegation battle by autumn. Coping with this felt like a test of Elland Road's resilience, and it hasn't been helped by Sunderland doing what we've always done, going top eight and bothering the big clubs. Losing 5-0 at Arsenal defined a certain defeatist mood, and the season so far was lacking a moment when the Peacocks could puff their chests out, jut their jaws, declare themselves contenders and gather some pride to take with them into the games to come.
Until this week. Beating Chelsea and drawing with Liverpool are more significant results of finding their self-esteem at half-time in Manchester, because now Leeds have only been beaten five times at Elland Road in three seasons and it still feels like a place where other teams have to worry, whoever they are. Given the importance of momentum to mood, and to managers who want to keep their jobs, redevelopment plans for the Old Peacock Ground might need to include a planetarium roof, permanent floodlighting and a rain machine so even a bright summer's day can be a horrible night for visitors to Beeston.
The main problem Liverpool had with the first half was trying to make the game go the way it looked like it should. Their possession was monolithic and they'd put the game into a classic expensive-against-cheap Premier League pattern of wearing their opponents down until, if necessary, they could bring the most expensive striker in British club history off the bench, or a Ballon d'Or contender, while Leeds turned to Sebastiaan Bornauw. United were struggling to find the positivity inspired by their week-old new look as, without Lukas Nmecha, direct balls to the front were thudding like dud shells around Noah Okafor and Dominic Calvert-Lewin. But they were, with three central defenders on the pitch, resisting.
One of those central defenders, Joe Rodon, desisted at the start of the second half by passing straight to Hugo Ekitike, only a £69m striker, who took the gift and shot it past Lucas Perri. And two minutes later the whole Leeds defence seemed caught in their own spotlights when Ekitike threw himself down wanting a penalty and everyone paused for the referees' conference, except Ekitike, who hovered behind the distracted defenders until Conor Bradley had the ball back from Gabriel Gudmundsson and pulled his cross back for the striker to score again.
In the rain and the cold and the dark, this now threatened to be a joyless night for Leeds fans. Liverpool locked themselves down to block whatever glimmer of goal Leeds might have seen at 0-0. The idea of 5-3-2 as a magic number crumbled against the red organisation. So, Daniel Farke switched back, taking off centre-back number three and restoring a new, improved version of the tried and no longer trusted 4-2-3-1.
A winning team raises everything around it so after the second half at City and the hunting down of Chelsea, Leeds were not doing the old choreography the same old way. With fresh impetus and new belief the Peacocks were giving it more and made 4-2-3-1 work for them as good as 5-3-2. A goal came back because Wilf Gnonto backheeled with confidence that belies his performances this season, rushed into a big space on the left of Liverpool's penalty area, tricked through back-tracking defenders and was taken out, on the byline, by their desperate last. A penalty against Ibrahima Konaté, the ball struck powerfully into the net by Calvert-Lewin.
That goal was United's gesture to earn back a roaring crowd that other teams in other places don't have. The noise Elland Road was making was correlating to the momentum the white shirted players were attacking with, and the panic spreading through the red ones. Brenden Aaronson was the next vital component. Off the bench to a grumbled greeting, he was pretty much the same as he ever is, a frantic boy jittering through dribbles as if he's moving across the pitch atop a pneumatic drill. And Liverpool's defenders couldn't work out what on earth he was doing. From his allotted right wing he drifted in behind Calvert-Lewin then took the ball and turned left, towards the space Gnonto had exploited, his feet pitter-pattering as he played a one-two with Gnonto and again as he went wide and squared into the box for Anton Stach. Who lets a midfielder stand so alone in their penalty area? Liverpool do, and then they let him find a nice angle for a disguised shot and put the ball low into the corner while Alisson dived the wrong way. So much for the champions and their 2-0 lead.
Quality should always pay in the Premier League and so it was only five minutes before Liverpool were ahead again. With nothing to protect anymore they surged forward, attacking through the middle where Leeds were not as taut as they had been before the substitutions. Ethan Ampadu didn't track Alexis Mac Allister, Gnonto didn't track Dominik Szoboszlai, Gudmundsson was left marking both, and the first dummied for the other to score. That hurt. Some big saves from Lucas Perri's big bearish paws made sure there wasn't more.
Quality will not always pay in the Premier League, though. I felt renewed hope when, with a few minutes left, £80m Ekitike was replaced by £125m Alexander Isak. Can a marquee centre-forward actually make a team worse? In this Liverpool team, maybe. So far they've had one league goal for their money, and for the season they're on six league defeats. A newly bought nine-figure striker coming off their bench felt, somehow, like a bad omen for Liverpool. These champions are beset with problems that Leeds United do not have.
One intangible is how they're coping, as a group of people, with the tragic loss of Diogo Jota. It's easier to read the way they're falling into the trap that caught Manchester City last season, of screwing up their title defence so badly so quickly that there's nothing about playing in the Premier League that motivates them anymore. Owners and managers will fret and worry and plead about the importance of re-qualifying for the Champions League, especially when they've just spent £450m on transfers. But try telling a champion football player that it's just as important now to finish 4th as it was last season to be first. When Billy Bremner said, 'you get nowt for being second' he was informed by the contrast he felt by being first.
As a group, Liverpool's players look sick of being moaned at by their captain, Virgil van Dijk, who is hardly playing better than they are. Ibrahima Konaté, who was giving Leeds his half of the box and fouled Gnonto for the penalty, was playing as if very aware that his club wanted to spend another £35m on Marc Guéhi to play these games instead of him, that by the time Liverpool are competing for the title again, he'll be out. Mo Salah, glowering from the bench, was already thinking about finding some journalists after the game and giving them a piece of his mind.
I've been idly comparing Salah's reaction to a couple of games on the bench to Brenden Aaronson's, even after he was booed from his seat to the field. And I'm leaning, yet again, on Marcelo Bielsa's belief that enthusiasm to play is the most important thing a coach has to inspire in a footballer, in a modern age of football when players have to drag their enthusiasm out from under piles of money and attention. And I've been admiring, more than the changes in formation or approach, the sheer enthusiasm of Leeds United's players not just for winning but for drawing in a league where a point at the bottom is as vital as three at the top.
Leeds looked unsure going into nine minutes of stoppage time. That was an opportunity to equalise, but it was what had done for them at Manchester City, too. After the ball circulated against a wall down one side, Rodon took charge on the other side of launching the ball into the box and earning his team a corner. It's what was required: a set-piece to focus their minds. Then another, and with the pressure on Liverpool's box in front of the Gelderd End, a question was rising about whether the reds could actually be bothered, at this point, with all the work involved with defending a cross yet again. Ryan Gravenberch, at the back post, didn't bother himself to turn to look at Ao Tanaka once until it was much, much too late.
Tanaka's goal took Leeds to 16th, where owners 49ers Enterprises have promised their investors they'll finish. Fifteen points have been earned from fifteen games, exactly the target Daniel Farke is aiming for. And while the past week might be saying something about tactical flexibility and new plans, it also suggests to me that the biggest necessary adaptation has been made, successfully, by re-focusing the players away from playing the same way every week towards the near-inevitability of winning in the end in the Championship, and re-motivating them to scrap for every point, to never believe a defeat is a permanent, to take 16th place and one-point-per-game as their new north star and give everything to an honour that the Liverpool team they played this weekend, and the promoted Leeds teams in the past who still haunt them through fans' memories, would shun as something far below what their self-esteem tells them they should be competing for.
Celebrating the draws like wins is the way you get, one day, to celebrate the wins like wins. And to celebrate the draws, you have to win them. If Leeds United's players understand that, and it has looked this week like they do, they have a great chance of staying up this season. ⭑彡
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