Manchester City 3-2 Leeds United: Can't do right
Last Thursday, after a long question about whether he and the board were 'still on the same page', Farke simply answered, 'yes'. Even after getting more right at the weekend than anyone predicted, he might have to hope nobody asks him again this week.
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The immediate problems Daniel Farke has after his Leeds United team did better than anyone expected in Eastlands are that, in football, winning the argument is not enough if you don't win any points, and being in the bottom three is bigger than being right.
Everyone got this game wrong, in advance. All the fans who triple-captained Erling Haaland were ignoring that Pascal Struijk is a much better player now than last time he was in the Premier League, to the extent that Alfie's boy was subjected to one of those exhausting debriefs with Pep Guardiola. They ducked and weaved around each other, Pep wittering into one ear while Erling tried to let it straight out the other so he could get on with saluting the travelling fans of the club he loves. Haaland couldn't escape his manager's clutches, after nearly two hours of failing to get away from Struijk's careful minding.
The punters who lumped on a big winning margin for Manchester City lost their money, and the pundits who expected Leeds to collapse at 0-2 down the way they did at Arsenal were made to look foolish. And everyone who had said Brenden Aaronson's defensive workrate on the wings was not what the team needed had to look at Wilf Gnonto dawdling around in the first minute while Matheus Nunes ran away from him to Bernardo Silva's pass and think that, as Phil Foden volleyed in off the crossbar, perhaps there's something to be said for a hard working winger.
There was a sense about the starting line-up of Daniel Farke caving in to some outside opinions, of giving the people what they want by starting Gnonto and Dan James, although Gabriel Gudmundsson dropping out as well felt like collateral damage. And the whole exercise was exasperating when it failed so quickly. Perhaps Farke had been right not to change it before, but what good was being wrong now?
Leeds weren't terrible in the first half but they were demoralised by City's second goal. Again, how's your luck with this one? Twice at corners, Joško Gvardiol had created danger by walking unmarked past Gnonto and Ao Tanaka. From the second, Lucas Perri had to pull off a brilliant save to stop Foden's shot — from an offside position — towards the top corner. A minute later, now marked by Jayden Bogle, Gvardiol took advantage as Perri failed to punch under pressure from Silva and maybe he would have been better left unmarked, or maybe Illan Meslier should have stayed in all along, or whatever the heck.
Leeds couldn't let the game stay the same and they did not. Gnonto and James departed, the latter with a hamstring problem. Let's alight here on Farke being right about something, to no good end. It was held as a mystery that James could be playing two games in a week for Wales while Farke stuck to his belief that five months out equals up to five months of work back to full fitness. It needn't take that long with careful management, says Farke, and he laboured through the point in one of his press conferences that an hour in a 1-0 win over Liechtenstein and an hour in a 7-1 win over North Macedonia were a very different workload to starting in the Premier League. James played a combined total of 75 passes in those games, compared to four at Manchester City, because in neither international was he chasing Jeremy Doku up and down the wing. Half a game of that could have put him out for several more weeks.
Jaka Bijol and Dominic Calvert-Lewin came on and within four minutes Leeds had a goal. A lazy pass out from Nunes was passed back again, through by Tanaka, and Nunes confused stopping Calvert-Lewin with putting the ball on his toe eight yards from the middle of the goal. Manchester City seemed to start panicking, Gvardiol morphing into the player he would have become if Victor Orta signed him for Leeds, and Guardiola had to do something. He was helped, in this, by goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma calling an injury time-out so the rest of the players could huddle around their coach.
As a lesson in how coaches can't control everything no matter how stressed Guardiola gets, look at what happened next. With James Justin off the pitch injured, Leeds attacked anyway, and with his head full of tactical insight Gvardiol clattered through Calvert-Lewin's upper legs in the penalty area, a sure penalty. Lukas Nmecha hit his shot low, on target, towards the bottom corner, where it was saved by penalty expert Donnarumma, but Nmecha was a safe scorer on the rebound and Manchester City were teetering.
Until, of course, they weren't. They weren't worth a multiple goal victory of triple-Haalanding ease, but they did earn ten minutes back from the Donnarumma time-out and did have Phil Foden, who as he couldn't get the ball into the box settled for dribbling around further out and slotting into the bottom corner, the one second half shot that wasn't blocked, winning the game in the 91st minute.
All of which was great fodder for the real business of deciding whether Daniel Farke should keep drawing a wage from Leeds or not. He had, by the looks, achieved with his half-time what Guardiola had not with his time-out, and made a strong intervention to change the game. With Bijol added at the back, Calvert-Lewin up front with Nmecha, and both wingers off the pitch, United's second half had looked like a 5-3-2, and had looked like it worked.
Before we get into Farke's view on that, let's go back to last week, when Marcelo Bielsa was talking about the perception that he never makes changes because he never changes his formations.
After a reporter told him watching Uruguay's defeat in the USA was like 'tearing his eyes out', Marcelo Bielsa called the press together to analyse, well, everything.
Bielsa talked about people who says he is, 'self-critical, but he always does the same thing'. Bielsa says, "What a perfect phrase to stick in anyone's head without having to think." He said people always equate different plans to different formations. "So instead of playing 4-3-3, he played 4-2-4, whatever." But, he said, "For me that is not the problem. The change of style has other characteristics.
"I constantly use 'plan B' and you have to see it in the players who play in certain positions with different characteristics. Those are the alternative plans. Now you say, 'no, it's always the same, you always play with two midfielders', right? (But) How can it be the same, to play with Martínez and with Ugarte as it is to play with Valverde and Bentancur?"
Bielsa's point was that the principles of play remain the same, but different players do different things with those principles. And what players do, to Bielsa, is more important than where they stand. Now, over to Daniel Farke, in his post-match press conference in Manchester:
"We're always prepared to play in a 3-5-2, it would be too easy to reduce it to this," he said. "It's not that simple. It's about the principles, how you want to play against the ball. The execution was now how we planned during the whole week. The structure gave us more clarity but in possession we still had one striker and one a bit more flexible ... We couldn't have done it against Aston Villa, they had a completely different structure in the pressing and were sitting deeper. We (previously) had Nmecha and Calvert-Lewin both not on full fitness. When you don't need wingers and can create more through the centre you can do this (3-5-2) and we did today. It's always a solution but not in each and every moment."
Farke's point is that he didn't throw his usual game plan in the bin for this second half. 'In possession we still had one striker and one a bit more flexible' — in the first half this was Nmecha, as striker, and Tanaka as 'one a bit more flexible' around him. In the second half, when Calvert-Lewin was the flexible striker, the game changed because he plays a different way to Tanaka. But if you insist on writing down where he was standing, he was in the same place as Tanaka had been.
At the back, Leeds now had three central defenders, but they defended more successfully in the second half by doing the same as in the first half, but with different players. Where City's wingers had been double-marked by either Gnonto and Justin or James and Bogle, in the second half they faced two defenders every time. Either Justin and Struijk or Bogle and Joe Rodon had to be played through, and as defenders by trade, they defended better together than the first half's winger + defender combo. But the principles were the same: two centre-backs in the middle, and two players out wide to stop the wingers. All that changed were the characteristics of the players involved.
All of which Farke is correct to point out. Assuming, that is, he wanted what he got — a tirade from aggravated fans in advance of not 'sticking with 5-3-2' against Chelsea on Wednesday night. If Daniel Farke has a problem, it's this habit of over-explaining to people who don't want to hear. He could listen to Bielsa on this, too. "After losing 5-1, the listener may be reluctant to appreciate what I'm saying," he said last week, a variation of what he used to say after losing at Leeds. Although it never stopped El Loco.
I said, 'if Daniel Farke has a problem', and judging by Monday morning's report in The Guardian, he definitely has several. Matt Hughes is reporting that 'senior figures at the club (are) expecting him to be sacked if his side lose home games against Chelsea and Liverpool ... Multiple sources at Leeds have privately conceded that Farke’s fate is in the balance'.
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That's probably not news. Although I'm intrigued about who those passive 'senior figures' expect to sack Farke, if it's not them. What is news is that multiple sources, presumably in the boardroom, are now prepared to let this story be written, and for it to be larded with detail about how 'others (than Farke) at the club have raised questions about the quality of the players he brought in amid accusations that he favoured physicality over technical quality'. When responsibility for signings is being publicly shifted away from the board-appointed head of recruitment, Alex Davies, and sporting director Adam Underwood, and a new category of 'players he (Farke) brought in' has been created, it's a sure sign of blame being shifted.
Last Thursday, after a long question about whether he, Underwood and managing director Robbie Evans were 'still on the same page', Farke simply answered, 'yes'. Even after getting more right at the weekend than anyone predicted, he might have to hope nobody asks him again this week, before or after playing Chelsea, before or after playing Liverpool. ⭑彡