Bristol City 0-0 Leeds United: Scruff and numbers

Here was a game where I wanted to grab a few Leeds United players by the scruffs of their bright yellow shirts and shove them one by one into the goalmouth. My hot idea was that if we piled players up in the six yard box, then added the ball, this would result in a goal. And oh how I wanted a goal.

A goal would have won this match for Leeds and it looked easy to score one. The mystery, as the game wore on, became about Leeds finding it not only hard to score but to play well in the final third. What happens? Passing stats always show how easy it is to keep ball in defence, where players can tap up some relaxed numbers going short and square. But it's different at the other end. The ball moves faster. The red shirts of the other team's players move in closer. The spaces are smaller. While your brain is screaming 'relax' your feet are arguing that screaming isn't helping. You can't find the goal even though it's right there. You can't find a teammate even though there are nine of them plus, if you don't fear the wrath of the away end, Illan Meslier. If you do find one all you realise is that they're going through the same stuff too.

So against Bristol City, Leeds United's players kept messing up in good positions and missing each other with passes and missing the goal with stressed choices to shoot that were wrong. "All a bit scruffy," Daniel Farke said. And I wanted to grab the players by the scruff of the neck and show them how easy it would be to make the right choices, pass to their friends, shoot the big ball into the bigger net.

The standard solution for this situation is to employ someone to be on the pitch with them who will take not just the players but the whole game by that scruff and bend both teams to their will until the shape, like a balloon animal, makes us laugh. Where are you, new Pablo Hernandez, why didn't Leeds buy you, mythical no.10? But watching this match drained my faith in the cliche of one player to run it all because there were players trying to take control of this thing for Leeds, to influence and dictate — Wilf Gnonto with his creative brain and Brenden Aaronson with his instincts and Ao Tanaka giftwrapping his passes — but it was all for nothing as the players they interacted with only had dumb responses. One player wasn't going to be enough to solve whatever was short circuiting Leeds in the final third.

Bristol City had a lot to do with it too. They had lots of reasons for getting this 0-0 draw, not least that they had drawn five games either 0-0 or 1-1 already this season. They're unbeaten at home, and this is what they do. Before the match, Ashton Gate hosted an emotional tribute to their manager, Liam Manning, returning to the touchline after the tragic death of his baby son. "I was proud of the players again, as I have been throughout a very emotional period," said assistant City manager Chris Hogg after this game. "They have handled themselves brilliantly and everyone involved can feel pride at the way they have pulled together for Liam."

After the match, Daniel Farke said Liam Manning's grief should be kept separate, and he would "not use this in an analysis of the game". But perhaps that was wariness about the way games are analysed through press conferences and after, when blame is hunted down and reasons are dismissed as excuses. Things like this do matter. It's not easy to switch emotions when the referee blows his first whistle, and probably not healthy either, and as Hogg said, Bristol's team were playing their games through "a very difficult time". There are good reasons to believe, and it is a good thing to believe, that the prelude to this game was not forgotten by the twenty-two young people, many of them young fathers, playing the game a few moments later.

I was reminded of 2010, when Stoke City announced their manager Tony Pulis would not be at their match with Aston Villa as his mum had died earlier in the day. Pulis did, in fact, quietly make his way into an executive box at the Britannia Stadium, five minutes after kick-off, to watch Stoke going a goal down in the first half. At half-time he went downstairs, changed into his tracksuit, and surprised his players with a team-talk. His walk from the tunnel in the corner of the stadium to the dugout for the second half roused the fans, and Stoke's two turnaround goals — in the 80th and 93rd minutes — felt inevitable. Football Manager fans may not like it but sometimes emotions can compete with tactical matchplans, and they don't like it because when they play it they feel so many emotions that they can't project through the screen into the databases running the game. Footballers can and do use their emotions to play. It's part of what makes it a game, not an algorithm. When Marcelo Bielsa said that he would win every time if his players were robots, it always felt like the day he got a team of robots would be the day he'd lose interest and quit.

In Bristol the Robins put in some shuddering early tackles to signal they had a strong defence committed to keeping Leeds out. Before half-time Dan James could have scored when Wilf Gnonto put him through with a deft through ball, but as he took it on the run and the goalie advanced James' stride meant he had to shoot at a stretch and the result was something soft and saveable. At the start of the second half this was reversed, when Tanaka, facing his own goal in his own half, intuited space over his shoulder for Jayden Bogle to attack and put the ball over there for him. After running forward Bogle put a pass inside the full-back, giving James a rare chance to use his pace behind a defender. His cut back was in front of Joel Piroe but rolled to Gnonto's left foot and that deceived the keeper and all his defenders bar one, Zak Vyner, who blocked the shot on the line. There was enough visible net to score into and Gnonto should have scored, and there were other things he could have done to make a goal out of this — take a touch, blast the ball harder, put it somewhere else — but sometimes the player determined to stop a goal has an advantage over the player trying to score. Gnonto didn't do anything wrong with his shot, but Vyner did more right.

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Leeds couldn't create much more than those moments and their imaginations seemed to have been shortened by the absences of Largie Ramazani, through injury, and Junior Firpo, through suspension. Firpo may have been the bigger miss, the rampant left-back replaced by cautious Sam Byram. Sometimes it feels like Byram cares too much and it makes him too careful, or maybe his knees worry him too much for his legs to follow his brain's attacking urges, but I felt in the closing stages of last season that his presence at right-back was slowing Leeds down as every pass he took from Joe Rodon went back. Firpo has been playing, meanwhile, without a care in the world, flying out to the Dominican Republic to panenka the odd penalty, marauding into opponents' boxes to create more chances than a left-back should. Some of United's best moments in 2024 have come from Firpo almost disdainfully making things happen when others ahead of him have not but he wasn't on the pitch to sort this game out. Perhaps a player can take a game by the scruff after all, but they don't have to be a traditional no.10, or even canonically any good. When Byram did get into City's penalty area, breaking the offside trap to receive Tanaka's high pass out of the centre circle, he lobbed a near-post cross that Mateo Joseph headed over, a minute after coming on the pitch. Otherwise Byram was one point of a slow buildup triangle, and the one time he took a player on with some stepovers he fell over.

After the game Daniel Farke reverted to a standard script about how his players had just needed to be a touch more accomplished in front of goal. "So many shots, ten times more xG than they did, didn't allow them one proper chance," he said. "We created more than enough to score not just one goal. We were a bit wasteful in front of goal I have to say." It should be remembered that the players who did become accomplished at scoring last season were quickly nabbed for big bucks for the Premier League. Farke was still able to try Joel Piroe, whose finishing he adores, and Mateo Joseph, who is still new to all this, and Pat Bamford, who is old to all this but got a glowing tribute from his manager in the midweek press conference. I don't know what more anyone can do with those three, apart from expect them to score and take an away point when they don't.

That point is readily available this season and United's solid defending, so that not winning doesn't mean losing, shouldn't be underrated. City's striker Nahki Wells was kept down to two touches in the penalty area, good against a player with three goals in eight this season and a record of playing well against Leeds even if it has only brought him three goals. It's a clean sheet, it's a point, it's a long season, it's a good result. But comparing Wells to Piroe in this game brings us face to face with The Problem: while Wells had two touches in the box, Piroe only got one. In the attacking third Wells had sixteen and Piroe just eight. Wells left the middle third to other Robins and only took three touches there while Piroe, United's no.9, was touching in the middle third fourteen times. "Statistic wise, really dominant, really good game," said Farke, but these are the sort of stats that back up what the eyes saw, the red team being dominated out of attacking, the yellow team playing itself out. ⭑彡