Cardiff City 0-2 Leeds United: Hoover, damn
Assuming Farke's messages about selling vacuums are getting through to the players, the next step is still about the time it takes for them to learn, act, and achieve.
The worst thing that happened to Leeds United in Cardiff was the 23rd minute red card shown to the hosts' Joel Bagan, who fouled Wilf Gnonto as he ran through on goal and then, while the referee tried playing advantage, kept on fouling Wilf Gnonto in various different ways. It shouldn't be news to anyone that playing against a bottom of the table team of ten players with a manager soon to be sacked is easy on paper but horrible in reality. It wasn't clear that Cardiff City ever had any notions of attacking or scoring goals in this game, but they at least had to pretend a bit at first. All chance of that went away with Bagan. So did United's hope of overcoming the negative reaction to last weekend's defeat to Burnley. Even if the rest of the game had become what Daniel Farke likes to call a 'firework of football', it would only have been against ten elevenths of the worst team in the league, so, so what.
Instead of a firework, though, Leeds could only come up with more of the same stuff that didn't ignite when Burnley were defending their lead last week. In this case it did work, against Cardiff's defence of their numerical deficit, but it didn't work enough, and that's the current complaint against Leeds United — what's working isn't enough.
Leeds are, objectively, playing very well. The team had good control of the opening stages in Cardiff and were attacking as well as could be expected with a debutant winger, Largie Ramazani, making his first moves in the mix. Part of the team's stalled feel is coming after a prolonged summer transfer window, when Farke has lost and gained a lot of players, but before he has had much time since the deadline to do much with his new ones. As always that possible line-up of fresh, unseen players must be better than the one on the pitch, but in the meantime, there were good signs of Gnonto, Brenden Aaronson and Jayden Bogle coming together, as games go by, as a fruitful connected right side. In the first half, Bogle had eleven touches and a shot in Cardiff's last twenty yards, compared to two touches in the twenty yards near Illan Meslier. Time is doing for Bogle and Aaronson's newness around Gnonto what time should, but the pain is that Leeds spent this time last season turning Archie Gray, Georginio Rutter and Crysencio Summerville into seamless players, time that should have absolved this need to start again.
As it was, new boy Ramazani set off a firework all his own in the 30th minute, an exhilarating goal that was well-timed after the red card to quell doubts about Leeds making any breakthrough at all. The style of it also inspired hopes that Ramazani could hit the fifteen goals Angus Kinnear expects this season. Fifteen like this would do very well, a burst from the centre circle that Ramazani transformed into a state of calm so he could pick a route for his shot precisely inside the post. Anyone can pick a route, I suppose, but Ramazani added the technique to send the ball exactly where he'd thought of.
Which is great news because until Joel Piroe came on as substitute an hour later nobody else seemed capable of matching their deeds to their scoring thoughts. Mateo Joseph, Ramazani again and Bogle all had big chances to add more goals before the half-time reset, but leaving them unscored was the foundation of a predictable second half in which Cardiff concentrated on not conceding and Leeds let their imaginations wind down and wander against the Bluebirds' congested back rank. One big chance to double the lead was spurned, but missing a penalty is all on the taker, so boo hiss at Pascal Struijk. Piroe showed the first eleven how it should have been done all game by getting onto Aaronson's pass into Cardiff's box and hammering the ball into the net from an angle, three minutes before the clock hit ninety.
To tell the full story, Piroe also profited from what hadn't been available to the first eleven for most of the game — Cardiff feeling a faint hope of equalising and getting caught upfield, trying out a long throw and making a mistake. Until then, Leeds had been caught in a trap that often holds them, that the whole division seems set up to grip them with: they're a team that thrives by seizing on errors and counter-attacking into space, in a division of teams that aren't good enough to attack them in ways they can counter. Since relegation, watching Leeds in possession has been like running through the experiments that led Red Bull and Jesse Marsch to conclude that passing the ball to the other team and harassing them for it back is the easiest way of making chances.
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Farke had to take flak for not engineering Piroe's opportunity earlier, by using options such as ditching two defensive midfielders for one or both of the more forward thinking alternatives on his bench, or asking the players to abandon their usual patience and go more direct. He had made attacking changes in the first few minutes of the game, looking at Cardiff's set-up and telling Ethan Ampadu to drop into a defence of three while Bogle and Junior Firpo went up to provide attacking width either side of Aaronson, Ramazani and Gnonto, three no.10s in a forward line of six players. In the second half it seemed like what Farke wanted was for the players he'd picked to find a way to make things work, to give them the time they need on the pitch together in a game that, leading 1-0, should have been impossible to lose — a training session, in other words. After the game, he seemed frustrated enough by their failure to score more goals to confirm that was his aim.
Farke's view is that the lack of goals was all about a lack of Piroesque determination. "Perhaps because I was a striker in my real life in football, it's more or less I would have died to score goals," he said after the match. "This mentality is something that we definitely need to add." If I were to pin some blame on the manager for not getting more goals out of his squad so far, it might be about his choice of analogies. "I spoke so much about this," he said, "our offensive players need to create a mentality like a Hoover seller. You have to ring forty doors before you can sell one Hoover." How many young millionaire footballers in 2024 can relate to the doggedness of selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door? It might be better to talk about how many times you have to get your social media team to post before that one Instagram reel truly bangs.
But assuming his message is getting through to the players, the next step is still about the time it takes for them to learn, act, and achieve, with another goalless match for Mateo Joseph as a useful example and perhaps a demonstration of why Farke didn't throw him into starting during last season's run-in. Joseph was very good in Cardiff — his strength on the halfway line was key to turning Pascal Struijk's headed clearance into a pass beyond the back line for Ramazani to score — but he's never yet felt the rhythm of first team goalscoring the way Joel Piroe has in his time. Perhaps it's better to be seeking that feeling at the start of a season, not under the pressure of a run-in to promotion or failure, although the way this season has started feels much the same as spring. In any case, every sign is that goals will come to Joseph, but for that to happen he has to keep starting, and then he has to miss less and score more, and that's all, all on the clock. All we can do is keep playing him, keep enjoying his work outside the box and his potential within it, and wait for that reward.
Which feels like a heavy handed metaphor for the whole damn team. The misfortune of this match is that Cardiff were so bad, and the red card came so early, and United's attacking unit is still so raw, that it couldn't tell us anything about what Leeds United are going to become this season, or how soon. So it ended up looking like all the other performances that fans have been rejecting, but then the Championship is a division full of games that are so like each other that predictability feels like a common, low level crime. A bad team self inflicts a red card against a much better team, and the remaining bad players make it harder for the good players on the good team to score. It's an old script, and not memorable, but not bad when Leeds United win 2-0 in the end. ⭑彡