Burnley 0-0 Leeds United: Scared of sexy
If Expected Sexy was a metric the Championship would not score highly and Burnley's pride in all their clean sheets would hit different.
A football game can not be a joyful celebration of free-flowing sport when it's between two teams at the top of the Championship, by definition. All chance of fun is dragged from these fixtures by the cacophonic iron-foundry pressures exerting themselves upon ninety minutes that become not releases but reminders of everything that's at stake. That's by manufacture, not by supporters' choice.
The strains on Ange Postecoglou at New White Hart Lane and Ruben Amorim at Old, Old Trafford are being documented daily and endlessly discussed but that attention is part of their job protection, and so is their vague mission: improve the team, try to win something, keep people happy. Those instructions can be hard to follow because they're ill defined but can help because you can make of them what you will. People don't like the results? But tell them to look at the style, look at the youth development, look at the progress in a second tier trophy. And then, tell them, look at what a sacking would mean. As owners, Daniel Levy and Jim Ratcliffe can't, for their own reputations, get rid of their coaches because they've only recently, amid a great deal of publicity, hired them, and several others before them. The tension at those clubs becomes, in a sense, protection. Owners can escape their managers by sacking them, but they can't escape the criticism. In exchange for the intense scrutiny the managers get a voice.
Managers don't get as much room to wriggle at the top of the Championship. Sure, you don't have to deal with as much media attention, unless you want it (exit Wayne Rooney, pursued by a documentary crew). But what you get is everything else, worse, without the protection of an interested press corps. At Turf Moor on Monday night the old industrial stands were hosting international billionaires and their representatives, powerful people carrying the bills of relegation on behalf of investors who have been promised Premier League profits in the billions. These owners were looking down on dugouts stuffed with staff who are all, at this level, expendable. There won't be emergency podcasts and TV debates if Daniel Farke or Scott Parker are fired, just a passing acknowledgement that the EFL is crazy then back to Ange-watch. There's nothing vague about the instructions to Farke and Parker, either, no conceptual long-term planning about building a club with resellable youths and aiming for the top six and European qualification, maybe a cup if you'd be so kind. In the Championship there's no room for equivocating about getting promoted, no chance of showing another side with metrics or sentiment analysis. Not when the billionaires you're Zooming about transfers can reply over WhatsApp with charts showing the financial implications, for them, of your failure, if you fail. And it will be you Daniel, it will be you Scott, who fail. But good luck. The investor groups will all be watching the match on Monday.
During Covid-19 I undertook a little project of watching every FA Cup final I could, in order from the oldest, and at the end of this mostly demoralising experience I stumbled upon a truism I wish I'd heeded earlier: that finals are usually worse to watch than semi-finals. It's not hard to understand why. The tension, nerves and stakes are so much higher when your team is one of two with ninety minutes to play, instead of one of four looking forward to 180, or if we talk about European competition and two legs, 270. Think about Pep Guardiola, over- and out-thinking himself in Champions League finals. If you want to know how a great side plays it's better to watch them being something like themselves in a semi-final than struggling to operate at the shredded ends of their nerves in a final.
Teams have always reacted naturally to pressure and emerged for big matches cramped, tense, unable to perform freely, but recently football has gained new, richer owners, attracted by the excitement of the game, who have poured so much money into it and created so much more pressure by their expectations of profits and status that, when it comes to the big games, there's simply too much at stake now to go out there and play. Everyone is terrified: managers of losing, and paying with their jobs; players of losing, and incurring the wrath of their managers; owners of losing, and facing up to their shareholders. The bottom of the Premier League and the top of the Championship is where you can really feel this, as the revenue gap is compounded by spending rules that make a sunshine investment, made in the Premier League or when promotion was on the horizon, quickly turn into a nightmare of finances and, if enough people know you've got money pouring out the backside of the fiasco, a bonfire for your business reputation. In the Premier League you can invite your mates in the USA round to the big games against the famous teams they've heard of, even if your own club isn't all that good. Try explaining post-industrial Lancashire to them as anything other than a museum. 'You mean,' you risk them asking, 'People actually still live like this?'
So you get a game like Burnley vs Leeds, 3rd vs 1st in the Championship, and people looking forward not so much to the kick-off as the final whistle when it's all over and, like Burnley vs Leeds, nothing has happened to upset anybody and nobody has lost anything, except the people who paid to watch it, but hey who cares about them. Fans, in these instances, are just bystanders buying tickets to provide the vocal chorus for a bunch of rich people raging in accountancy at the impact of football players on their investments because they didn't properly understand that the risk, the jeopardy, and the fun, was the point. The thing fans love about football, the excitement of not knowing what will happen and seeing it solved through athletic, creative brilliance, does not appeal to the spreadsheet minded. And at the top of the Championship near the end of January every owner's mind is on their spreadsheets.
Burnley were useful opponents for Daniel Farke as he is widely criticised by Leeds fans for his style of play but Scott Parker's team made a few useful arguments on Farke's behalf. First, that this is just what it's like now at the top of the Championship, and we can take last season's Leicester into account too. Defend, stifle, and rely on your recently-Premier League quality players to score enough against the mid-to-low Championship dross to win enough games to get out. Fans might pay the bills but managers' wage slips are signed by their bosses and their responsibility is to fulfil promotion for them at all costs. Parker, and Farke, are doing what their bosses want.
Secondly, Farke's team are so good — by reputation, at least — that even such strong peers as Burnley approached the game in a mood of defensive fear. It's hard to understand a team that's doing as well as them being that frightened of Brenden Aaronson but there they were, cowering away. Thirdly, Farke can absorb some more criticism that his football is boring by pointing to Burnley and saying, well, at least Leeds aren't that bad. "I wouldn't say the sexiest piece of football today," he said at full-time, and it's true that if Expected Sexy was a metric the Championship would not score highly and Burnley's pride in all their clean sheets would hit different.
Burnley didn't quite take this game to a Rooney's Plymouth level of six at the back, but that's because they're a better team. Football is a game about spaces and Farke's Leeds try to create them to exploit them, moving the ball around to pull teams apart. This season most teams are counteracting that by staying deep, staying tight, and staying close together in front of their own goal. Burnley, instead, played a high line far from their goal and created a mirage of spaces to tempt Leeds in, because their defenders have an ability to close a space back down again as soon as it appears. What looks like a gap that you'd never get from Plymouth becomes, as soon as you pass into it, a smaller gap than Plymouth would ever allow, as Maxime Estève and CJ Egan-Riley thunder across so fast you start to wonder if the space ever existed. It's defending by gaslight, trying to convince you the gaps you saw were never there, so next time you're less likely to test what your eyes are telling you with a pass into a space because you think it isn't space, it's a trap. Falling for that trap once might mean conceding a goal on the counter, and that was the one thing Leeds couldn't have happening.
The game became compressed in a different way to our usual because while Burnley played deeper than Leeds do with the ball, taking faffing around with the goalie to new levels in their own penalty area, out of possession they pushed up near to halfway where, in possession, Leeds were also playing, Joe Rodon, Ethan Ampadu and Ilia Gruev passing around far from their own goal. So instead of trying to pass their way into Burnley's penalty area Leeds were trying to pass through the crowds on the halfway line and get to the forty yards of empty grass behind that led to the penalty area, where Dan James may have roamed had that ever happened. Because Burnley's defenders were so high up the risk of losing the ball and facing a counter was much increased, so the chances of Leeds going for broke and trying to break through decreased. All that space — United were not going to get lulled in because as soon as they were in it the mirage would be gone.
Ignoring the oasis on offer dented some of the use Farke could make of Parker's tactics, because it looked like the Clarets were there to be spilt. And perhaps they were. Much is made of Burnley's defensive soundness but they're helped by their goalie, James Trafford. Since he last conceded a goal he's kept seven clean sheets, but he's also faced fourteen shots on target carrying an Expected Goals Against figure of seven. In that time, United's Illan Meslier has faced thirteen with an xGA of 4.1 but six of those shots and more than half of that xGA was, in a word, 'Hull'. Also buried in Trafford's stats are two late-game penalty saves against Sunderland but that's sort of my point — Burnley's defence are, beneath the clean sheet stats, keeping things interesting for their goalkeeper by letting teams take shots at him and giving away dumb penalties for him to save, while Leeds are doing a better job of protecting their goalkeeper (who can keep things plenty interesting enough for himself). The end point of this numerical wrangling is a feeling that Leeds could have done more against Burnley's defence to get themselves through and test their 'keeper. Beating that 'keeper is a different question, but it might have been fun to see what Farke calls Piroe's world class finishing against Trafford's shot-stopping, even just once.
That we didn't, and that the transfer window is open, means even more ferocious demands that Leeds buy a striker, and buy a creative no.10 who wouldn't turn back against Burnley's mirages but romp on through and make those spaces exist by their own will. But that's assuming anyone at Leeds was unhappy about how the game went in Burnley. Not from a style or entertainment point of view, but from the way it alleviated the fearful paranoia that grips teams between the Championship and the Premier League, when the point for billionaire owners is access to the billions at the top level. This is not, for them, the fun part. This is about avoiding losing anymore money in this slog of a division, and about the best guarantee possible of being welcomed to Etihad hospitality next season, to Anfield and the Emirates. Fans might think goals and creativity are the best guarantee of that, but all the evidence of recent seasons is to fuck what the fans think, control the ball and defend from the front. Boardrooms don't want the Championship promotion race to be exciting, they want it to be successful, and their paranoia instructs the coaches and permeates the games.
Creative no.10s know this too, and sometimes when thinking about the transfer market it helps to put yourself in a playmaker's boots. What would you rather do, if you were Emi Buendia? Play seventeen miserable games of space-strangled football in a division you slogged out of before? Or go to the Bundesliga, where teams are scoring on average 3.3 goals per game this season compared to 2.5 in the Championship? He's off to Bayer Leverkusen, 2nd in the league to Bayern Munich, and overperforming their xG by ten clear goals in a league where only five teams are not scoring more than expected. Leverkusen sound like a team that loves finishing a half-chance. Meanwhile in the Championship, only Norwich are exceeding their playmakers' expectations by more than six, and eleven sides are underscoring the chances they're making. Where would you rather try being a creative midfielder? The league where strikers finish chances, or the league where what little you're allowed to do goes to waste?
Meanwhile at Turf Moor, Burnley vs Leeds: it was raining, it was windswept, it was defensive, it was argumentative, there was one shot on target, there were no goals, it wasn't fun and it definitely wasn't sexy. As an advert for the top of the Championship it was telling the truth. It was like this because nobody wants to be here, not coaches, not players, not owners, not goalscorers, not creative no.10s. At least now, with the biggest game of the season so far not lost, Leeds may be able to relax a bit at home to Cardiff. But relaxation in the Championship is always relative, and tension is sexier in theory than practice. ⭑彡