Leeds United 4-1 Crystal Palace: Can you handle it?
The Peacocks' stubborn refusal to meander means making their own fun. Elland Road is a palace of nerves, as long as you can hold them.
Just when it felt like this match couldn't be any more fun, Leeds United threw stoppage time at us. Crystal Palace, after throwing substitutes on in desperation — one of them sixteen years old — won a blunt penalty when Christantus Uche collided with the fridge freezer playing for Leeds in goal. Justin Devenny, an elder sub, converted that.
Everybody laughed when he ran to collect the ball. Was he imagining the Eagles could overcome the thorough 3-1 they were living through? But moments later a Palace cross evaded everybody except Devenny, whose header came off the back post and away. Leeds had loaded their own team with replacements, who didn't have the self assurance of the starting eleven. There weren't 45 minutes left, but there were bad memories of the switch flipped at half-time last time Palace came to Beeston. That day 1-0 become 1-5 in the stinging blinking of eyes we wished had stayed firmly shut to protect us from the outrage.
When there's a happy ending, though, that's theatre. Ilia Gruev, somewhere near Palace's penalty area, contrived for his slow descent after a tackle by Borna Sosa to end in the box and force the referee, reluctantly, to suggest a penalty kick to Leeds. After he and VAR were unmoved by a clattering Brenden Aaronson took in the box in the first half, there was a high bar for this, and the vidref couldn't ignore how far outside the box the foul on Gruev had started. And finished. A free-kick, then, and Anton Stach's swerving hammer-shot into Dean Henderson's top corner that left the goalie cursing and raging and flinging his arms, and Leeds fans doing their joyful version of the same things.
I've written some bits in the last few weeks about how the last acts of matches have helped us tidily rearrange the preceding action, and the final acts of tension and release took the joy of this win further than we'd have felt by cruising to 3-0. (There's a stat going around about how many goals Leeds have scored and conceded in stoppage time this season, but it should reflect that stoppage time here lasted eleven whole long minutes; these are not snatched last minute goals as we used to know them, but they are still heightened by their technical status as codas.)
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The nervous late stages also illustrated a clear difference between Leeds in this game, and Palace, who rather than wait for the end to get tense were a dervish of angst from minute one. Their manager was, anyway. This was my first in-person experience of highly rated cup-winning coach Oliver Glasner, and I don't know about his players but he'd worn me out in the first five minutes. I pity and admire the person who sits at the end of Palace's bench and has to listen as this spray-jeaned maniac whirls away from the action, does the splits, waves his arms about, and keeps screaming and shouting — in this case about where his defenders were standing for a short goal kick in the second minute — for longer than anyone can possibly need to express whatever has upset them about something so meagre. Daniel Farke sometimes gets criticised for seeming quite passive in his technical area. That looks a whole lot better when this is happening for ninety minutes in the other dugout.
Glasner said afterwards that the way his team defended set pieces was "a bit embarrassing". In public, he'd spent most of the month preceding this game moaning about the congested fixtures around it, and he now conceded he could have been doing other things. "I start with myself," he said. "I think the preparation was not good enough. Maybe I talked too much about tactics and not the basics." He added, "It's the fourth game in recent weeks losing from set-pieces. It looks like we're not sharp enough and have to show a different set-up or mind set."
What it looked like to me, as Ethan Ampadu wound up the long throw that made United's opening goal in the 38th minute, was that Palace didn't need the distraction of their manager gesticulating at them as they tried to get ready for the bombardment. Glasner was waving, waving at them all and waving at them individually, waving right up until the ball was launched, and if you could transcribe his defenders' thoughts in these moments I imagine you'd read, 'Who's that skinny prick waving at now? Is it me? Is it him? What does he want? Should I be over there? Should he be over there? He's still waving. Who's he fucking waving at? Oh shit, here comes the ball —'
Sometimes less is more. And sometimes less looks more like trust. Earlier in the season, Daniel Farke was asked if Leeds needed a set-piece coach, as if it was impossible to believe Leeds could be a threat from corners and throws without some hip guy popping up in the technical area to wave a tactics board while he micromanaged a group of professional footballers standing forty yards away. Farke answered that assistant coach Eddie Riemer was 'taking care of it'. Part of his answer could also have been that these are, indeed, highly paid professional footballers, and he should be able to trust them to remember during the match what they learned during the week in training.
Leeds have paid the price, sometimes, for leaving games up to the players to sort out while Farke stands at the side and stares quietly. But there's a longer term benefit to letting the players take responsibility for themselves, such as when Ampadu or Joe Rodon spread their arms, mimicking their manager, taking the initiative and calming things down or speeding things up without being asked. You could see the opposite among Crystal Palace's players, who were barely given a moment to think for themselves and so, when they were on their own, came up empty headed.
And about Joe Rodon, on this theme. "We played a back five against the ball, a back four with the ball," Farke said afterwards, explaining one of the night's more startling sights, Rodon overlapping Jayden Bogle to the corner flag and dinking a cross to the back post. "With the ball Joe Rodon was a full-back, at times a bit like a winger ... credit to the players, Joe Rodon has probably never played full-back in his career. To execute with this quality was outstanding."
And he was being left to get on with it, whatever had to be said about this mad scheme said already in training. The idea, Farke said, was to disrupt a 'compact' Palace defence, with help from Brenden Aaronson — in for Ao Tanaka — to stop their dangerous counters. "I asked him before the game," said Farke, "you're the only man in the Premier League who can cover 15km and we need this today." The upshot of all this disruption and prevention was, "to bring us into position to win set-pieces. They're not a gift. You win throw ins, corners, central area for Anton's free-kick."
And then you score them, if you're left in peace to get on with it. After all Glasner's gesticulating, Ampadu's 38th minute throw was flicked on at the front post by a Palace head, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin read the ball's flight perfectly. His controlled first-time shot was right at the goalie but he'd stayed calm and watchful, and you can see the art happening in the slo-mo replays as he moves even slower, but still faster than anybody, shoots again from the rebound, and scores.
Goal two, in first half stoppage time, started with another Ampadu throw, this time from the west. It was hurled as intended away from the carnage of the six yard box to the edge of the penalty area, where Jaka Bijol ran from the middle to head it over his shoulder towards goal. Again, Calvert-Lewin read the ball like a book, adding another to this season's monograph about elegant headers. Back in 2020, The Athletic asked an academic expert in biomechanics to watch some of Calvert-Lewin's headers: "He always has a consistent contact point of the middle of the forehead," they noted, "just where the hairline meets the forehead ... If he re-directs his headers, he only does so at this point of contact; he does not try to 'spin' or 'glance' his headers". It's our joy, five years later, to be watching this happening while he wears Leeds United's shirt. And Calvert-Lewin seems to be enjoying it too, laughing away at whatever Ampadu said to him in the celebratory huddle.
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Glasner's response was to withdraw Will Hughes, the former Derby County child star still haunting Premier League midfields like a Champo Truman Capote. It didn't change anything. Any sense of Palace fighting their way back into contention was snuffed out after five minutes when Jean-Philippe Mateta tried to run out of his half with the ball, chased by two: Stach shoulder-barged him from the left, Ampadu slide-tackled him from the right, and Elland Road cheered like this was goal number three. All Glasner's pre-match talk of tiredness, fatigue and only having eleven players he could conceivably play had done its job. His team looked exactly as exhausted and beaten as he'd set them up to be.
Leeds were now playing with verve and style. Aaronson harried, bullied and pushed England's Adam Wharton to the ground — yes, not vice versa — and quick passes from Noah Okafor and Stach sent him dashing down the left wing. Aaronson's disguised flick for Gabriel Gudmundsson's overlap was exquisite, and his low cross was just kept away from Calvert-Lewin. At the end of the first half Aaronson had drawn gasps from the crowd with a flick of his boot down the line to Stach, but just in case you thought the real Brenden had been kidnapped, his last act before being subbed off was to nick the ball and stop a Palace attack then, when he got it back on half-way, somehow beat two players with one of the worst attempts at a dragback you'll ever see. His markers were left flinging their arms in disgust, the crowd was cheering again and laughing, and it's becoming more and more evident that the key to enjoying Brenden Aaronson, which is separate from whether you like him or not, is just to take him for what he is. After being booed on against Liverpool, he took an ovation off here.
It was 3-0 by that point. The dominance in open play required a third set-piece to finally beleaguer the Eagles. Leeds gave it full demoralising impact by scoring just on the hour. Stach's inswinging corner was headed clear, Aaronson headed the ball back into the box, Bijol took the pace off it with a flick, and Ampadu realised just in time that he could beat Henderson to the ball as it dropped in the six yard box. After dominating the midfield all night, he foxed the box and scored his first Premier League goal as efficiently as Erling Haaland goal-hanging for a hundredth.
That finished the match on the hour. Palace, the best away team in the Premier League, the FA Cup holders, Terry Venables' team of the eighties, with only three games not won on the road and only five goals conceded, were beaten. 3-0. I am not ashamed to share, there were olés. And if you don't think that's brave, they were heard with the ball at Lucas Perri's feet. If the only game from then on had been trying to get Calvert-Lewin's hat-trick, the last half-hour might have underwhelmed, but not feeling whelmed by a 3-0 win over Palace would have been even more cocksure than cheering Perri's passing. So thanks, Leeds, for ending Elland Road's year by creating the tension Crystal Palace felt at the start, just to show our team could handle it better than theirs, again. Let's do it all again, soon. ⭑彡
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