Making no mistakes
A lot of us spent the 2010s pleading with Leeds United to even vaguely gesture towards being normal, and now here they are at last: officially not a laughing stock.
A lot of us spent the 2010s pleading with Leeds United to even vaguely gesture towards being normal, and now here they are at last: officially not a laughing stock.
The sense of Leeds United is that the club does know what it's doing, and it has been winning this game with itself from the start. Winning is easier when you're winning, and when draws are helping you win and defeats aren't hurting you, you're winning all the time.
Leeds fans are, as Farke says, emotional. It doesn't matter how it makes the manager feel, as Howard Wilkinson once said, but it mattered that the team saw their manager using fans' emotions as fuel for his own calm. Since Chris Wilder called his club's fans a 'disgrace', Leeds have won every game.
The tension of watching Daniel Farke's Leeds was summed up in these moments against Sunderland, football that pushes you to the brink of frustration then seesaws suddenly into giving you what you want.
A lot has to be right about your team for winning 2-0 to feel like a letdown. Like it or not, fairly or not, 2024/25 is demanding more of Leeds United.
Marcelo Bielsa says football is getting worse because of the pressure and the scrutiny and the blame and the accusations. Or to put it another way, Lee Dixon's commentary.
The death of football is relentlessly demanding that the manager is held 'accountable' when organised chaos does not deliver perfection.
This is not to start arguments about one style being better than another, or one manager being better than another. But what people are finding to be faults in Daniel Farke's football would have solved many of the problems people had with Marcelo Bielsa's.
Maybe this is the formula. Coaching is less than we think: it's just saying things quietly to footballers. It's also more: it's knowing what to say
Players are leaving but not arriving. The ones left behind are being taught to play wi' ball but not wi'out ball. The defending and stuff, hopefully, is coming next week. But in the meantime we had to play Manchester United.