Wolves 1-3 Leeds United: Score-a-lot
Premier League life was better for Wolves before they started scoring goals. Leeds, now they've begun, should feel no need to stop.
Before this match my thoughts were a mingle of, come on, surely Leeds will score in this one, and maybe it doesn't matter if they don't: perhaps goals, the best part of football, aren't as necessary as we think. Certainly our West Yorkshire world would have been better this past week if Gabriel Gudmundsson hadn't bothered.
After that match at Fulham I browsed around in Brighton & Hove Albion's Premier League scoring record, or rather their lack of one. It's 2025 and Danny Welbeck is still plugging away for his average six goals a season while the one striker who threatened local barn doors got loaned out to Roma. This week I looked up another of Andrea Radrizzani's 'model' clubs, Wolves. They managed positive goal differences in their two years after promotion in 2018, shocking the top flight by zooming up to 7th on the back of super-agent Jorge Mendes fun-conveyor from Portugal. But then they consolidated, finishing 13th, 10th and 13th, scoring in 38 games totals of 36, 38 and 31. Obviously 0.82 goals a game was not sustainable so in 2023/24 they entertained by scoring 50 and winning two more games — and dropping a place to 14th. Last season they added four more goals and finished 16th. Life was better for Wolves before they started scoring.
Which is the Premier League in a nutshell. The greatest league in the world is a paranoid, fearful place because the status is measured in money, and dropping to the second tier is no longer a sporting sanction but an existential financial penalty. When the reward for attacking more is dropping three places nearer to the drop, the formula for success becomes simple.
Hence this weekend when reports tell me Newcastle United look like 'slowly drying paint', Aston Villa are 'cumbersome and uninspiring', Arsenal are 'stodgy and self-limiting' and, after the Gunners lifted their second half game against them, Manchester City ended up with just 34 per cent possession while defending deep for a point. 'Super' Sunday featured two 1-1 draws and a 0-0, and on top of all that, everyone is really into long throws this season for some reason. The game, people. It's gone.
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To Leeds at Wolves, then, and how no team in the top two divisions scored more than the Peacocks this weekend, and only Norwich vs Wrexham had more goals. Going down the divisions only Bolton, Notts County and Walsall managed to score four. United are back, woah woah etc.
United's performance at Wolves confirmed everything we thought we'd seen on the opening night against Everton, everything losing 5-0 to Arsenal and losing the goddamn transfer window had buried. From their beatings of Everton and Wolves, Leeds can make decent claims of becoming a decent Premier League team this season, boasting credentials at either end of the pitch that were lacking in north London.
Even if nobody else cares about them we do still love goals so we'll deal with them first. The ones for Leeds, anyway. If the win over Everton was a gift from our Champions Again of 2024/25, Wolves were beaten with the first big contributions from the new class, settling in. Dominic Calvert-Lewin headed an equaliser that said everything about why Leeds didn't just keep Pat Bamford for this season, as his presence in the box gave Jayden Bogle someone to speculate with, hitting a cross towards him that wouldn't have done anything for Joel Piroe either. Calvert-Lewin had waved to Bogle, though, pleading for this cross, and after it was deflected and looping it let him move between two defenders, hold off the first, and read goalkeeper José Sá's position on the edge of his six yard box: the rest is all technique and a Becchioesque leap, placing a header into the top corner over Sa's dive and in front of the Wolves' fans.
They were soon invited to read the name on the back of Calvert-Lewin's shirt, while his overall display as a rugged, effective and tireless target invited Leeds fans to reassess their preconceptions of a man and his manbag. Calvert-Lewin was demonstrating what football fans knew way back in the 1980s, that there's no contradiction while being into fashion, footie and fighting.
It might be forgotten, because it took so, so long for the referee to allow the free-kick to be taken, but Calvert-Lewin won the foul for 2-1, too. Two minutes and twenty seconds after Anthony Taylor blew his whistle for that, he blew again so Anton Stach could stick a no nonsense shot over the wall and into the top corner, and bearing in mind how rare direct free-kick goals have been for Leeds we can now overlook Taylor's delay. Wolves' Toti Gomes wasn't overlooking anything, asking Sá how the heck he'd been beaten, and Sá's answer — turning and pointing to the top corner — was a feather for the shot's power and quality. He'd been on the right side of his goal. He'd had a clear sight. He was never saving it.
Leeds were not quite rampant but the third goal, from a third new signing, was reassuring for the day and the season, because Wolves gave up a gift — Emmanuel Agbadou passing from his own half straight to Stach in the centre circle — and Leeds, as they'll need to when presents come their way, accepted. Agbadou was trying and failing to mark Noah Okafor all game and this was worse as he was so far out of position; getting the ball from Stach, Okafor for once didn't try to dribble around anyone, simply running into the box and burying his shot across Sá. Another long term benefit of this goal is the clip United's coaches can show Noah when they're convincing him that beating just one or two players will do because look how much fun it is when you just run and hit the net.
All that from the new boys suggested their game by game integration is going to be worth the patience. At the other end Leeds are still relying on the old stagers. They were not reliable for Wolves opener, after seven minutes, as Joe Rodon went chasing out of defence and Sean Longstaff's chase into defence couldn't beat Fer Lopez's pass to Ladislav Krejčí, who shot past Darlow. Leeds, though, were not pushed off course by merely conceding, the way they had been at Arsenal. Ethan Ampadu and Sean Longstaff were the stern core Leeds lacked in that game, and after Leeds unflinchingly cruised to a 3-1 lead and Vítor Pereira called three reinforcements from the bench, they and Stach and everyone worked with the back four to repel Wolves' second half bombardment.
Leeds made ten clearances in the first half. In the second half they made 39, Pascal Struijk leading with eight of those, while Jaka Bijol keeps watching, wondering, hopefully admiring. After putting six crosses over in the first half, the second half Wolves came up with 29, and while there are questions about how Leeds allowed so many, a lot of confidence can come from dealing with them all. Some of the dealing depended on Karl Darlow, who had Illan Meslier watching pensively from the bench with Bijol and could keep Lucas Perri there too if he keeps up like this, this being the sort of form Nigel Martyn came up with for Everton aged 38, to Leeds United's sorrow.
There's a reason to look at the statistical measuring of this match. Oh, the old xG. According to that, this game should have been won by Wolves, 1.8 to 0.5. The eye test tells me that it didn't end like that because of Leeds United, squashing 0.8 out of Wolves' attack, adding 2.5 of value to their own. Performances that upend numbers this way will do very nicely next time there's a top-six type of team on the other side of the ledger: the Premier League, from our Championship starting point, has to be like this, about not letting teams have everything they could have, about taking more than we think at first we can make. Blow all the mathwebs away, though, and Arsenal apart, I've enjoyed every Leeds game I've watched this season. The defending has been strong, the midfield has been competitive, and the attack has offered more than the scorelines recorded — which was the last frustration.
That the forwards have lagged, though, can be explained by their comparative newness in (what Marcelo Bielsa says is) the most difficult part of the pitch to play. Gudmundsson has slotted into left-back so seamlessly he feels like a forever player, and I won't discuss Sean Longstaff in terms of newness because he's been doing the same stuff for years, just not for us. All the rust — and the injuries — have been up front, and if the wait for goals has felt long, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Noah Okafor in two weekends are each on two starts and one goal. Goals, even if the Premier League is grinding them into superfluity, are still great fun when Leeds are scoring them. And rare as they've been, they've already taken Leeds to two wins of the nine or ten needed, and one of them away from home to boot. Tracking against last season's pathetic bottom three: two wins took Leicester eight games, Ipswich needed sixteen, Southampton 24 — which was, in fact, their lot. I don't think Leeds are done at two. ⭑彡