Blackburn Rovers 1-0 Leeds United: The step up

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Nobody needed or wanted 100 minutes of this game, but as the clock ticked beyond a century of frustration at least it vindicated one of Daniel Farke's least loved traits: the 70th minute substitution. I might be wrong about this, but his late changes seem like a point where Farke is ahead of the curve in football, and my theory felt confirmed the other week when I saw him furious that our match at Millwall wasn't extended into meaningful stoppage time. Because games now last so long, the 60/30 rule for subs is out of date, and the science about risking injuries in red zones and giving players time to make an impact has shifted the dial to 70/30, or at least 70/25. In Lancashire on Saturday, though, 70/in-fucking-inity wouldn't have been enough for Leeds to score a goal. Maybe this typifies one of Farke's other traits, about how being right won't always make you popular.

So Farke had to find something else to have a strop about and there was more tantrumming than we're used to at the end of time in Blackburn. He was popping off at the ref, Lewis Smith, and Blackburn captain Lewis Travis, and presumably when he couldn't find Lewis Baker he went back for more with Travis until they hugged it out. Then in his press conference he had Junior Firpo in his sights, for letting the team down with a headbutt in Bermondsey and not raising his game on his return to the team.

Nobody was raising their game against Rovers, though, and that's probably why Farke was so frustrated. From the start this match looked and felt and was a bout of sluggish doom. In the first few minutes Joe Rodon was caught so far behind the defensive line he could have been back playing for Swansea last week calling for Byram to be offside; instead it was Tyrhys Dolan sprinting through the middle and, even after Firpo raced back to intercept the through ball, Rodon still preferred to stand and look while Firpo roused himself again to clear his own interception.

Still, it was Rodon speaking to LUTV after the game, telling everyone the forwards had been naive. "I thought we had chances in the first half, clear ones to score a goal," he said, and not taking them allowed Blackburn to "change their system and they park the bus."

The afternoon tempted finger-pointing and Rodon wasn't totally wrong but he wasn't right either. Yes, Leeds had chances, mainly thanks to the Rovers' goalie trying to pass the ball — "We were brave, trying to play out from the back," their manager John Eustace said, while the lines between brave and stupid closed in around Aynsley Pears. Neither Wilf Gnonto nor Joel Piroe could punish Pears for that, and between the chances Blackburn won a penalty and Todd Cantwell scored it. The mythical double decker was never backed into place, though, the actual problem with Rovers being their pressing from the front of a 4-3-3.

The actual problem with Leeds, then, was their search for space foundering a long way short of the depot. The room was right there — all around them — but finding it was beyond them. Their passing didn't have the crisp quality of a team that was going to play its way through to score, which is what Leeds are supposed to do, and it's a kind of hidden offence. We can highlight how Ao Tanaka didn't tick. Blackburn's goal was, basically, on him: missing a pass from Gnonto in midfield, he chased back and, maybe petulant, barged Dolan over. But his larger offence was his passing. The stats show his usual high hit rate of 94 per cent — he completed 61 of 65. But there was fault in the way, not in the what, and he was not alone in it. Leeds players have a bad habit, and it's often what causes them to turn back towards Illan Meslier, of not giving good balls to their teammates. The pass gets there, but it gets there to the wrong foot, or a bit too far in front, or a bit too far behind: they're passing, but without enough thought for what the player receiving the pass is going to do next. That was the real reason Tanaka didn't get the ball in midfield before giving the penalty away: Gnonto laid it off towards him, but a foot too far in front.

It's hard to know what Daniel Farke is supposed to do when this stuff takes hold, and when it does, it grips Leeds like a contagion. The receiving players become second-guessing stutterers, never sure how a pass is going to hit them, so they end up taking the safest option to avoid giving the ball away. Farke can't go out onto the field and hand-hold professional footballers, most of whom earn more than him, through the niceties of passing to a yellow shirt. He can only get them in at half-time and shout at them, which also shouldn't be necessary, but did tidy some things up for the long second half.

Instead this is where Leeds really miss The Mythical Number Ten, now capitalised for legend, not for the usual reason of being creative enough to unpick the locks Brenden Aaronson couldn't open with a barrel of dynamite, but for exploding on the likes of Aaronson like a barrel of dynamite. Matches like this repeat matches from last season not just for the impotent recycling of possession but for the lack of a leader on the pitch who could influence Leeds United from front to back and back again and get them to sort it — whatever 'it' might be on the day — out. They don't have to be a playmaker, they have to be a personality. Ethan Ampadu tried fulfilling the role of new captain at the start of the season, but interpreted as arguing with refs and tackling his way into a knee injury. Pascal Struijk is a quiet leader by example. Rodon whinges too much. Firpo is often the most volubly pissed off with things but in Blackburn he had to start with himself. Then there are the forwards, who spend a lot of time looking good or bad-naturedly bemused with each other; and the game changers from the bench, like Pat Bamford, who contributed to the game's length by getting whistled offside a lot and banging his head off Struijk's.

As he often does, Gnonto came nearest to rising to the situation but without dragging Leeds all the way through. He aspires to it, but has never cracked the sort of cocky influence Todd Cantwell brought to this match for Blackburn. Perhaps Wilf needs to grow a bushy moustache and care less and I'm not entirely not serious. Maybe Largie Ramazani, who was suspended last season for calling a referee a "fucking dickhead" and was booked in his substitute appearance in Blackburn, can help. Before his injury, he was starting to look like the game-changing influence Luis Sinisterra briefly was, a player who can snap his team out of a bad mood by scoring a goal on his own. Leeds need more players who, on a glum day, can lift themselves.

Instead this day stayed glum, and John Eustace stayed master of Daniel Farke, the way Garry Monk used to torment Marcelo Bielsa. This assumes, of course, that managers are the magicians they're often made out to be: blamed for everything when the team loses, we still invest them with our belief that they have the power for one tactical tweak here, one alternative instruction there, that could solve everything. Maybe Daniel Farke should make changes earlier. But I'm not sure changes on the hour in Blackburn would have got Leeds anything more than ten extra minutes of Bamford being offside. Maybe he should have told the team to play a different way. He would still have needed more of them to pass properly. Maybe that's the key: passing lessons. Or, if there is a fundamental problem, it's getting the team to see the point in passing properly.

Anyway, this match had the same quicksand feel as last December's dire defeat in Preston, from which we can definitely conclude that Leeds should refuse to play any more winter games in Lancashire. That match, combined with the defeat at West Brom that followed, was last season's nadir, until the other ones: the game when faith in Farke and his players hit rock bottom, when Meslier's naive sending off confirmed the team's weak mentality, when play-offs felt like the best anyone in Leeds could hope for. That sour Christmas was followed by thirteen wins from the next fifteen games. The extra problem with this defeat in Blackburn was that it also felt like more recent retreads away from Elland Road: the defeat at Millwall, the underwhelming draws with West Brom, Norwich, Sunderland and Bristol City. If this was groundhog day, let's hope it was last season's hog. After home games against Derby and Middlesbrough next week, the next ground United visit is Deepdale. ⭑彡