Leeds United 4-0 Augsburg: Through the motions

It's unlikely this season that Leeds United will be able to dismiss opponents as easily as they relieved Augsburg of their interest in this friendly. But it's sometimes worth remembering that not every Premier League team we'll face is worth the hype the top level gets. 

Leeds will start the season next Saturday at Nottingham Forest, whose new manager Oliver Glasner has been spending his summer sounding very upset about cutting short his sabbatical to work under Evangelos Marinakis. "Honestly, I don’t think we [will be] in our top shape against Leeds," Glasner said, a couple of weeks ago. Last week, after the Carabao Cup draw brought everyone's mood down, he was the gloomiest. "So that’s two Premier League games within three days. Then it’s off to Anfield," he said. "Without wanting to paint things black, we will not yet be in our best condition at the beginning."

Perhaps the Peacocks have prepared very well, then, by taking on disappointing opposition from the Bundesliga and beating them handily, not just in the first half but in the first minute. Maybe Augsburg just weren't ready? Good. Maybe Forest won't be, either. Newcastle United are the second visitors to Elland Road and they're running to catch up all the players, and manager, who have left them this summer. They'll be followed by Crystal Palace, who are trying to rebuild after Glasner by swapping Brennan Johnson for Dwight McNeil. Good luck with that.

Overall there are nine new managers in the Premier League this season, plus Michael Carrick and Roberto de Zerbi in their first summers. Three teams are new up and one of them has already changed manager, giving themselves even more to cope with. Daniel Farke is now the third longest serving manager in the Premier League, but it's not just about coaches: Ethan Ampadu and Joe Rodon arrived soon after him, and Farke has steadily built his new team around them. 

Two of this summer's incoming players have, in pre-season anyway, slotted in seamlessly: Tarik Muharemović for Pascal Struijk, James Trafford for Karl Darlow. With hardly a ripple, they've made the team immediately better.

That helped Leeds take a certain grip on this match so early on. Trafford launched the ball, Dominic Calvert-Lewin had a curiously easy time bringing it down, Harry Wilson took a touch or two and squared to Brenden Aaronson, he span and played Anton Stach into the box to shoot in from an angle. 45 seconds played: scoring goals is easy.

This goal was a touch more ragged than it sounds. There's another world in which Aaronson dummies Wilson's pass for Stach. And yet another, closer to what happened, in which his spin and pass put the ball into Stach's path instead of slightly behind him. Stach's control was good, but his shot was in off a defender's foot. I'm greedy and want him to hit that cleanly into the top corner. But those little torn edges were how you knew this was pre-season, and how you know not to get carried away.

It got Wilson involved with a pre-assist and that's a good thing. I didn't include him among the seamless slotters because he's not supposed to be, and as such he's taking longer to become a part of things. Harry Wilson has been signed to add a new kind of creativity that Leeds didn't have last season, and the team still looks like it's trying to understand this new kind of player and what he can change, and what has to change for him to change things. 

In other words, most of United's dangerous attacks were on the left, rather than Wilson's right. Aaronson and Stach were exchanging passes like a pair of old pals, and made a big chance for Dominic Calvert-Lewin by engineering a way for James Justin to cross onto his head. Nothing wrong with the header, really, but it met a big strong hand from Augsburg goalie Finn Dahmen.

Wilson might be wondering what's going on. While Aaronson is elevated by the sort of service he gets from Wilson and Stach, encouraging him to join in with more skill and less scamper, what has Harry Wilson got over on the right? He's got Joe Rodon, that's what, 'Joe Salah' as Farke is calling him, rampaging up the wing on his way to the byline. Was this ever part of the deal, as United's Welsh contingent sold him a bright future in Yorkshire? 'Yes, and you know how for Wales our Big Joe is always at the back? Well...'

Joe Rodon's marauding is a consequence of Leeds having good attacking players, and of Muharemović and Trafford improving an already good defence. With the forwards marked, and the defence locked up, Rodon is the one with the free role and he's being given the licence to use it. It's one of football's long-standing tactical battles, about deciding which opponent can be left unmarked, and teams trying to make sure their unmarked player has the skills to use the space they're given. Wilson is hard to find, because he rarely has room. A pass to Rodon is easy, and if the other team doesn't expect him to swerve between two defenders and make for the byline, so much the better.

Well, I'm not sure it is better, from the point of view of just watching football. It's a shame to take a great attacking player like Wilson and use him as a marker-magnet to make space for Rodon to give playmaking a go. But that's a football thing, not a Leeds thing. What is a Leeds thing, if this carries on in the short term, is Joe Rodon's temperament. Early in the second half he just missed Calvert-Lewin with a low cross that a defender got a toe to first, and bless him poor Joe looked absolutely devastated about the kind of thing seasoned wingers shrug off all the time. Calvert-Lewin, in fact, was laughing about it. But Rodon is used to defending, where a mistake can mean catastrophe, and part of adapting to attack — apart from getting those crosses inch perfect — is adapting to the idea that less of what you try will come off, and that that matters less than you're used to.

But Tarik Muharemović scored United's second with an overhead bicycle kick in the six yard box after a long throw, so who can say what any of these people are supposed to be doing. James Justin scored the third after taking a throw-in on the left: via Stach and Ampadu he got it back, via a blocked cross he got it back, via Muharemović and Ampadu he got it back, and by zipping a pass into Calvert-Lewin he got it back, on the run into the penalty area, where he got it out from under his feet to put Dahmen down and finish into the corner. That goal was the spare-man theory in microcosm, the hopeful plan that whichever player gets spare can use the ball to such fast effect.

A third good goal was good but it depressed the game. With only half-an-hour gone Augsburg realised they had to try doing something, and from 3-0 up Leeds knew they didn't have to do much more but let them. The visitors were well capable of fizzling out their own attacks. The subsequent hour of containment will, hopefully, be good practice for when we're 3-0 up after half-an-hour against an undercooked Coventry in November and we're pushing Frank Lampard towards a pre-Christmas P45: but let's not rely on that.

The match was livened up towards the end by some substitutes who want to be starters, and Ao Tanaka set up a nice fourth. Sean Longstaff made an interception and Tanaka had Joel Piroe or Lukas Nmecha running into the box ahead of him: what an awful choice for a generous soul, as Nmecha will be here longer but Piroe would have been glad to say goodbye to Elland Road with a goal. Tanaka chose Nmecha with a perfect pass that he chipped over Dahmen's dive. 

So long, Joel, and thanks for helping with promotion. I think we'll be okay from here.  ⭑彡

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