Nottingham Forest 0-2 Leeds United: They all count
I usually just want to forget the Carabao Cup as early as possible, but this time I'm keener it should count: Dan James, James Justin, Lukas Nmecha, three goalscorers in a 2-0 win.
Leedsista is entirely written by me, a human person, and entirely funded by people like you, Leeds fans, who think decent non-AI, non-clickbait writing about their football team is worth £3 a month to read or £5 a month to listen to the podcast version.
If you enjoy reading what I write, I hope you'll consider becoming a paying member to help keep it getting written.
Find out what you can get with a 30 day free trial:
Nottingham Forest 0–1 Leeds United: Staching up ⭑ Stach, the hero, hadn’t had a great game. Nobody had. But the cliché about a good team being one that wins without playing well can apply to players, too, and Stach got his reward for sticking to it.
14th again, but better ⭑ Back in May, we wondered what Daniel Farke’s ambitious talk was all about. Now we know, and his new project begins in the same place: 14th, but better.
David O’Leary ⭑ From A-Z since '92 ⭑ O’Leary lined up for the next season’s squad photo, and the next season’s, looking increasingly anachronistic as his last appearances faded into obscure memory. Why was this Arsenal legend showing up for Leeds United’s photocall every summer, never to be seen in a Leeds shirt on the pitch?
The Carabao Cup has been interrupting our seasons for years now, sneaking in after the opening weekend to burst whatever bubble fans were trying to escape into. For example, Marcelo Bielsa's glorious opening weeks, beating Stoke and Derby and not losing any of the first eight in the league, included a second round League Cup exit to Preston. A year later the champions in waiting were out by the end of August, to Stoke on penalties at Elland Road.
We'd just beaten them 3-0 at their place, a jolt back to the days of clubs playing home and away day-by-day — picked from the records at random, Leeds 0-1 Arsenal on Christmas Day 1933, Arsenal 2-0 Leeds on Boxing Day. Seeing so much of Stoke so early, or Nottingham Forest this week, raises other Arsenalesque spectres: we still have to play Forest at home, and maybe in the FA Cup? Before you know it we're back to the early nineties, when we played Arsenal twelve times in three seasons. And only won once.
A lot to upend this week, then, as three wins at the City Ground since 1971 turned into two in a week, and our Carabao burden paid off with a better game than the Premier League fixture. Both managers made changes but only one seemed to know what he was doing. Afterwards Oliver Glasner said, "It’s about accepting and not finding excuses," then tried to excuse the game by repeating, as he has for a few weeks, that he's only been in the Forest job for a few weeks. He can't be expected, he's been saying since the day he arrived, to have a plan yet.
Daniel Farke's plan for Leeds United in this game wasn't quite seamless but it looked enough like it. Nico Elvedi replaced Jaka Bijol at the back and you'd never have noticed. After one excellent save on Saturday, James Trafford made one excellent save on Tuesday, diving low to keep Chris Wood's secure shot out of the goal's corner. Trafford had added a sharp one in the first half when Ola Aina mishit a cross at the near post, like a mistaken copy of Anton Stach's Saturday winner. He wasn't caught out like Matz Sels was.
I highlighted the mirroring of the two teams on Saturday but this time it was Leeds mirroring Leeds, taking the first game and doing it all again better. Tuesday's Stach was Sean Longstaff, pushed awkwardly forward in midfield and unable to do all the good things he was doing in pre-season. But, like Stach, he made a crucial difference anyway: five minutes into the second half, Arnaud Kalimuendo headed down to a midfielder, ours, and Longstaff slid a pass in front of Dan James. He was being chased by Neco Williams, a Welsh teammate who knew very well he'd never catch one of the quickest players he's played with. He had to rely on James misfiring the way he used to when put into these positions by Bielsa's no.9 needs, but Dan James did not misfire.
Dan James then went through a range of emotions while celebrating the goal. A smile, a frown, a moment to remember he was supposed to copy an online influencer's catchphrase — Daddy Wellness, aka 'the world’s healthiest degenerate' — then back to his own in-real-life real life, letting out months of non-scoring, non-contributing frustration and looking as focused and furious as he can, while being 5ft7in and a cutie.
The non-contributing is the interesting part with wee Dan. "We had the topic that we had not scored a goal when he was on the pitch last season [in the league]," Farke said afterwards, "and it’s like, he knew this." And that's rough. It's one thing for a forward not to be scoring, but like Stach at the weekend and Longstaff in this match, it's still possible to add something without performing well. James, however, has been labouring beneath the backbreaking absence of anything good he could point to.
Not any more, and given the opposition this was not your usual early-Carabao oddity (see Gaetano Berardi against Salford). But it might be hard to replicate in the Premier League. "We tried to create a role for him today," Farke went on, "which was probably not invented in football, because he was not a winger, he was not a wing-back, he was something in between." He was out on the right with wing-back thoughts, being allowed to forget them by United's increasing sending of centre-backs to full-back, making Leeds' defence like an asymmetric all-centre-halved back-four.
That's a lot of effort just to get Dan James in the team, but goal aside, it was paying off in ways that must have had Dominic Calvert-Lewin trying to sub himself on. James was put through behind Forest's back three, again and again, and was crossing dangerously, again and again, and Lukas Nmecha wasn't there to finish, again and again. Noah Okafor was offering similar service from the other side, plenty to clip up and show around to any striker Leeds might be interested in signing before next week, who might be interested in getting on the end.
With fifteen minutes left Nmecha got what he needed to score from. The ball slipped from Ethan Ampadu's long-throwing hands so his hurl into the box looped short of the six yard box, but Elvedi got to the ball and flicked it on anyway. Tarik Muharemović's follow-up header shouldn't be underrated, nodding through to the back post: like so much of what he does, with head or foot, it was grace above chaos. The finish was not. Nmecha and Neco Williams threw themselves at Sels, the ball bounced on the goalline, Nmecha kicked air and James Justin booted ball, into Nmecha's breadbasket, the pair of them putting it in from an inch while Williams took to bleeding on the floor. Who had kicked him? Not clear. Who scored? Not clear. Nobody was thinking about influencers in their celebrations. Justin and Nmecha were too busy laughing at each other.
Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
The rest of the game played out to Leeds' olés and Forest's frustrated fouling. Leeds won worthily but never easily. Apart from Trafford's two saves, Joe Rodon had protected him in the first half with a ludicrous seventy-yard dash, from Longstaff's lowest moment, a lazy pass on the right-wing that Kalimuendo took over and raced away with over halfway. He passed onto Chris Wood, and the ludicrousness here was how he nutmegged Elvedi on the edge of the area. Even Wood can't have expected that to work. Rodon, meanwhile, hadn't stopped running, tears in his eyes, to tackle Wood on the penalty spot before he could shoot.
Glasner had that, Trafford's save and Aina's miskick to cling to, but his team could never get a grip on Farke's. When Glasner made a quadruple change at 0-1, bringing his team somewhere closer to Saturday's, Farke brought on three of his own from Saturday and widened the gap. After the weekend, I was comparing this season's away hopes to last season's two wins away, musing on how long until Leeds match that and overtake it. Does this count? Can we decide, just this once, that the Carabao Cup counts for something in its frothy months before March? (It definitely counts for something if we make the final.)
Leedsista newsletter
Free, independent writing about Super Leeds in your inbox
Probably not, although the level of opposition and their own desire to start winning elevates this above recent seasons' midweeks of fizz-flattening fiascos. All the targets are Premier League targets (stand and salute the Premier League anthem here). But Leeds only added one away win in the cups last season, at Derby in the FA Cup third round, and anything better than last season is better done than not. Ticking off an away win in the knockouts, before we've even knocked on the door of September, isn't harming anyone down Elland Road way. ⭑彡
Leedsista is entirely reader funded, supported by Leeds fans like you.
You can help to keep Leedsista going by signing up for the newsletter for free, becoming a paying member, buying books or merch like t-shirts and mugs, or sending a one-off tip.
New! You can now give the gift of Leedsista by sending a gift membership to some deserving soul. You can buy either a month or a year, on any tier, for anyone you like, by clicking here.
One of the kindest things you can do is tell your friends about Leedsista, sending them articles and getting them to sign up. We still can't beat the good old word of mouth.
Thanks! MOT — Daniel/Moxco
Money off mugs!
Free members of Leedsista can get £1 off a Leedsista mug (as many times as they like. Paying members can get £2 off. If that's you, check your emails for the codes — if you wish that was you, you can join Leedsista by clicking here.