Brentford 5-2 Leeds United: Mind the gap
The idiotic waste of energy, with the net result of weakening an area of the squad that was strong, condemns the board more than any accusations of poverty. They've got money. What's lacking is sense.
We should start with Luis Sinisterra's goal, a treat. Just before half-time, Leeds were fuming, down 2-0 to an incoherent penalty and a harshly given, sublimely taken free-kick. They looked shocked, their only option to take their anger into the changing rooms and start again.
For the third time in his three starts, Sinisterra did something to change the run of the game on his team's behalf, and this was the best yet. Against Barnsley, when Leeds' second-string side were struggling to give him the ball and themselves a lead, he took both with a placed shot from 25 yards out. Against Everton, when Leeds were desperate to capitalise on dominance and equalise, he hit another long range shot, worth a point. He didn't alter the result at Brentford, but that wasn't his fault, and he did alter the mood in a way United should have made more of.
Brentford missed a Leeds throw-in and the ball went free. It looked like Rico Henry would capture it, but a zap of Sinisterra pace got him there first with a plan, and a toe to flick the ball up and over the defender into the centre of the pitch where he was fully in command. Twenty yards out, Sinisterra dropped the ball with his thigh, then stroked it across David Raya into the bottom corner.
It's wonderful. It's almost mundane. I bet it doesn't get nominated for Premier League goal of the month. It won't be anti-Leeds bias, the goal just isn't spectacular enough. The stanchion doesn't wobble, the net doesn't burst, it's not a top bin ping, it's a bottom corner stroke. Sinisterra, deliberately, sucked all the circus even out of the flick 'n' thigh drop because he wasn't out to impress here, or with his previous two, he was doing this to score. Take Tony Yeboah's era-defining thunderbastard of 1995: that could have gone over the Kop if he'd misjudged it. Sinisterra took no risks. This was skill and judicious finishing.
With stuff like this coming from a player who has barely got up to full fitness this season, it's perplexing anybody at Leeds wanted to interfere with the forward line in the final hours of the transfer window. Rodrigo was a loss to injury, sure, and with two bad misses against Brentford — one so awful we shall not speak of it here — Pat Bamford is looking more rust than iron man. But Bamford can improve, Rodrigo can come back, Joffy Gelhardt can play, and Mateo Joseph or Sonny Perkins can get some experience on the bench. Meanwhile, Brendan Aaronson can attack with urgency, Jackie Harrison can keep the forwards well supplied, Crysencio Summerville is a pest for minutes, Sinisterra is cutting through with numbers already. If you chucked Dan James into all that you'd feel like Leeds had a lot going on up front, and the stats so far bear it out: with ten goals, Leeds are the last of just six Premier League clubs with ten or more. They're a little over their expected goals, which is fifth best in the division (excluding penalties). Creating and scoring is going just fine.
Every player can always be replaced by better, and more cover can always strengthen a squad, but with five new outfield players featuring regularly and an attack working well, Leeds would have been justified to stand by their summer work and leave well alone. And yet, and yet.
After this game, Jesse Marsch tried to account for "a very crazy last 48 hours" of the transfer window. Instead he made things worse by saying of Dan James' departure, "it was clear that if we needed to add something that we needed to move something." When fans hear 'one in, one out' they hear 'finances', because that's the usual use of that idiom, but Marsch wasn't talking about money. That wouldn't make sense, because a season's loan of Dan James to Fulham would have made next to no difference to the club's ability to bid €43m for Cody Gakpo, or €12m for Bamba Dieng, or whatever they were offering for Hwang Hee-chan, Joel Piroe, Kelechi Iheanacho or Ben Brereton-Diaz.
He was talking, as he was before the Chelsea game and at various times this season, about the balance of his squad. He's been wanting a different kind of forward to the ones he had, and to make room on the roster for that player, Dan James would have to go. It was about creating a 'position', so instead of another winger always playing striker, Leeds would have the striker and one less winger.
"When we were trying to think about how to get the balance right in the team," Marsch tried to explain this weekend, "this was the key, [James] was garnering the most interest and it was the only way that we could create flexibility to try and go out and add a striker position that we felt we needed."
Leeds thought a deal was confirmed with Cody Gakpo, so James could safely travel to Fulham. "We had a plan," said Marsch, "and certain things got pulled out from under us based on decisions from players and agents and clubs that we didn't anticipate." That left Victor Orta howling in a conference room in Eindhoven, convinced he'd been 'tricked', and left Leeds with Dan James out, and nobody in, and a big hole in the squad they had been sure they were filling with Gakpo. Hence the deals for Dieng or any credibly warm body they could get, eventually coming down to Wilfried Gnonto. He's since been seen wandering in a daze around Thorp Arch, meeting Marsch and being sent back to Zurich to work out what just happened and get his stuff.