Nottingham Forest 3-1 Leeds United: Noise and hunches

This was a difficult, disjointed performance because it was never clear what the Peacocks were trying to achieve on their trip to Nottingham. That has become harder to discern over the last few matches. Instead of growing in purpose and power, a mist has been growing around Leeds United's players. But how do we see clearly what fixes mist?

Off-record investor documents indicated that United's owners, 49ers Enterprises, expect Daniel Farke to manage Leeds to 16th place by the end of this season. The aim for the following two seasons is 15th place. After losing to Nottingham Forest, after nearly a third of this season, Leeds are right where the owners want them to be: 16th, level on points for 15th.

What isn't made clear in those documents is how Leeds are expected to carry out this plan, how they will get to still be 16th at the end of May. This is the confusion that could end up making 16th too much to ask for. We know what Leeds are trying to do but week by week it's becoming harder to work out how. The gaps on the pitch between intent and action look like gaps between strategy and implementation.

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Some examples. The summer's transfer activity was let known to be about big strong players for big strong set plays. But Leeds are playing without interest in winning the corners that could make those big strong players useful, and didn't sign a specialist to take care of the deliveries they'd need. Lukas Nmecha, one of the big strong players, scored against Forest but with a lovely finish following some deft footwork to make a shooting chance. It was a good goal, but it's not what we were advised to expect. Nmecha looks an effective target man, as does Dominic Calvert-Lewin, but forward moves begin with short goal-kicks to a goalie who worries a lot about his feet and attacks must survive the panic from there. Anton Stach was bought to dominate midfield with his strength and power, but he's competing with Ao Tanaka to start furthest forward. In pre-season and in brief cameos Joel Piroe has hinted at his untried potential to be the best goalscorer in the squad, but as a smaller ball-player he can't get more than cameos even while the team's attacks might suit his strengths. What's actually meant to be happening, and whose idea was it?

Some of this bogs us down in chicken and egg debates about whether players are only following instructions or not following instructions at all. Neither of Forest's first two goals seemed like what Farke was asking for. For the first, the Tricky Trees patiently waited until an overload was sighted on United's left. The ball was lofted down the channel and with Jaka Bijol and Gabriel Gudmundsson each challenging a red shirt, Nicolò Savona had space to play with Dan Ndoye before Ethan Ampadu could arrive to help. Ndoye was now playing behind the last line, looking back at all his teammates, and a helpful parry from Lucas Perri made his low cross into a finishing chance for Ibrahim Sangaré. Farke had, immediately after Leeds took the lead, been telling his players to concentrate. Two minutes after scoring, they'd let all this happen.

The second goal came from a free-kick in Forest's half that had given Leeds plenty of time to set themselves defensively. A cross-field switch to Omari Hutchinson turned the Peacocks around but Ampadu still arrived in the box with plenty of time for reorganisation. What followed, or didn't follow, was about the sort of communication skills the players should have ingrained years before Farke came into their lives. Bijol gestured something to Ampadu about Morgan Gibbs-White and turned his attention elsewhere. Ampadu seemed to keep his attention on Gibbs-White, while still thinking he was Bijol's responsibility. Neither and nobody stopped Gibbs-White heading the cross in. Joe Rodon seemed to think all this was Gudmundsson's fault for letting the cross come in anyway.

What's a manager supposed to do about all that? It depends what you think makes players forget to do simple jobs. Is it a lack of quality inherent to a player like Ampadu, who with Jayden Bogle was relegated from this division before? Is it a failure of a manager who should be on their case to keep doing the simple things? Without getting into the head of every individual involved it's virtually impossible to say. What Farke shouldn't have done about it was go chasing his losses with attacking changes that gave Jack Harrison the responsibility of stopping Forest's lively sub Hutchinson, which Harrison did, by fouling him in the penalty area.

Some of what should be happening feels restrained by what's available to Farke, and he made clear before the start of the season that he didn't feel his needs had been adequately met. The apparent mismatching of players and styles turns that into a question about whether recruitment for the year was led by how the manager wants to play or what the club's data team says is important. Any gaps between those ideas aren't helped by the transition from Championship to Premier League while the number of quality players is necessarily small, meaning their absences are consequently large.

Farke is criticised for picking Brenden Aaronson on the right wing, but guessing his true opinion has to include the first choice right-wingers for the first three games of the season: Dan James, Dan James and Dan James. Wilf Gnonto was being picked on the left but his replacement, Noah Okafor, will give him a keen contest for a place. But Dan James' struggle for fitness has denied Leeds a dimension that his stats this season show up: despite hardly featuring since the first three matches he has still crossed more than any other winger, and those crosses make up more than a quarter of his total number of passes. Calvert-Lewin has been missing a key supply line and James' numbers are so distorted, crossing three times as often as Okafor on average, that James to DCL feels like it was part of a bigger plan.

Whether Farke can benefit from Dan James returning to fitness depends on whether he can last against the dull metronomic chanting of football's permanent dull argument: sack, back, push, keep, stay, fire, and other louder four letter words of gradually increasing strength and volume. Compounding the results and the deteriorating performances is the Premier League fixture computer, which is not looking kindly on defeat to Forest in what looked like Leeds' last winnable game for a month.

Can a manager survive what could become six games without a win — maybe without a point — no matter who those games are against? Or isn't this just the performative stupidity that most strategic planning is built on in football? How serious can a football club claim to be about its plans and strategies for a forthcoming season if, after agreeing it all through Powerpoint presentations and surreptitious crosschecking with ChatGPT, it all goes in the bin when the fixture list puts four difficult games in a bunch? Who is running Leeds United: 49ers Enterprises, or the fixture computer?

The fixture list is posing the question about what Farke was asked to do this season. Was it to beat Manchester City? Manchester City, later on Sunday, scored against the league champions by giving every blue shirted player a touch. Or was it to get a point per game or more on average and stay out of the bottom three? If it's the latter, that can only ultimately be judged at the end of the season. It might be too late by then and that justifies acting early. But it should be remembered that any decisions taken before then are, effectively, guesswork dressed up as wisdom.

Guessing that Leeds will take nothing but four defeats from playing Aston Villa, Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool is justified by our senses. Soothsaying becomes more difficult when we wonder whether going pointless through those matches will matter. The rest of the bottom six have four games each, too, and it's the combination of all 24 that will decide whether Leeds have been flung into the bottom three by mid-December or whether they're still roughly 16th enough to make being there in May feel as likely as it ever will. It's one heck of an accumulator if you fancy a flutter, or fancy sacking a manager.

The thing about sacking managers is that it's the easiest story to tell about football, so it has become the soap opera over which many pundits and fans obsess to the detriment of actually experiencing the games. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing else to Premier League football but the needles on twenty big sackometers. As soon as a new manager is hired, the betting markets put up odds on when they'll be fired. And because so many people are thinking about the managerial job market so much, it's the laziest way out when people running football clubs don't desire the same pressure or scrutiny on them.

It obscures that the most effective way of building a better football team is by getting better football players. Nottingham Forest are a useful example here. Their owner, Evangelos Marinakis, has sacked two managers already this season, but I don't think that's been in pursuit of some fine margin of coaching. Since taking over at Forest his real attention has been on players, and on spending more than he was allowed on signing as many of the best of them as he could. Against Leeds, Forest displayed some of the Dycheian basics — well organised, lots of shots — but that was a lesser factor than the quality of players like Elliot Anderson and Morgan Gibbs-White.

That Marinakis recognises this is clear from his behaviour. His biggest battles of the season have been keeping Gibbs-White away from Spurs, and keeping his managers from clashing with Edu, the technical director who buys the footballers. Nuno Espírito Santo was sacked because his coaching was less important than Edu's shopping. Ange Postecoglou was sacked because his results were embarrassing the owner. Dyche's job is clear: take the players you're given and be competent. Don't fuck up so much that people start talking about your boss. And don't get in the way of Edu and Morgan Gibbs-White's good work.

In its way that's an enlightening approach because it's at least a way out of the tedious focus on managerial careers, and resists the belief that managers are somehow omnipotent gods dictating every footstep of every player in every moment. Perhaps another manager can stop the players Leeds have from fucking up so often, or get them to attack better more often, or take over just at the point Dan James takes to the pitch and then take all the credit. But when the owners' target is 16th and the team's position is 16th, then any talk of changing the manager to change the strategy has to be recognised as the product of noise and hunches. ⭑彡