Cardiff City 0-3 Leeds United: Where the time goes

After watching his wondergoal at Peterborough last week, Pat Bamford’s dad called him up, concerned for his son’s hips, and whether all that jumping and landing, the twisting and swinging, had aggravated some familiar pain in Pat’s body. This weekend in Cardiff, concern was for his coccyx. 

Bamford joins Lucas Radebe in the annals of Leeds goals scored while on the arse. Radebe’s was an odd sort of sitting down kind of overhead kick, against Partizan Belgrade in the UEFA Cup, a game played in the Netherlands one teatime. The weirdness of Bamford’s goal was not only his breakdancing finish, humping off his haunches to spider-walk the ball in like Regan from The Exorcist being possessed by Gary Lineker, but that it was nearly finished for him, from three yards, by Junior Firpo.

What was Junior doing there? As close to the goalie as Bamford, as near to scoring as it gets? Making the goal happen, that’s what, with an intervention that was important to how Leeds won the game. Just over ten minutes had been played, enough time for Leeds to be looking better already than Cardiff, and high time for them to be doing something about it. Firpo, on the left in their half, did it, fighting off one defender, beating two more, and deferring to Georginio Rutter when he knocked the ball to Crysencio Summerville. In the penalty area Summerville beat three, using their ankles to help the ball’s progress, while Firpo’s run into the goalkeeper’s personal space gave Cardiff something different to worry about and somebody for the ball to bounce off, from Bamford’s first attempt to score, back to him for him to get up off the floor, stretch a leg and get poking. 

As Bamford said last week, modestly brushing off his Puskas award contender, every goal counts the same. But not quite. To Leeds, this season, an early goal like this is sent from nerve-settling heaven. It set Leeds up for scoring another by half-time, Dan James on the line this time after Summerville’s shot was saved, and there should have been at least two in the second half, only Summerville missed a penalty before Rutter made it 3-0 at the end, and then looking back at the first half again, two was the least Leeds should have had, so the final score should have been – what? Ten? There seemed no limit to the number of goals Leeds could score. And little doubt that Cardiff would score none, because they – apparently cohering and resurgent as manager Erol Bulut gets his ideas across – were anonymous. 

Firpo’s decisive dash from the left was needed to put the early differences onto the scoreboard, though, and there was a lot about Leeds that was different in this game, starting with him. Suddenly we’re seeing that gradually Daniel Farke’s Leeds are changing. Sam Byram has been a better defender than Firpo when he’s played at left-back, and Firpo was a point of weakness here against Josh Bowler on the wing, Cardiff’s one hope. But in the last few games Leeds have benefited from Firpo’s attacking to an extent that outweighs his worrisome defending, still getting three clean sheets while he goes upfield setting up goals. 

For the second successive game Ethan Ampadu was centre-back, another contributor to the clean sheet while aiming his passes further forward, faster, from further back, a new way for Leeds to play. Ampadu’s passes can do more travelling because Bamford is a new target, with three goals in three games, hushing the doubts about whether his body would ever let him score again. Well, not all the doubts. Even Pat’s own father is still worrying about the strain on his hips, but unless the worst happens we should enjoy being in the middle of the best: a long overdue Pazza Bamfs hot streak.

Bamford pinning defenders further back is creating more space for Rutter, who used to be trying to create space for Joel Piroe to run through but now looks invigorated on the ball in the gaps made for him by Bamford. With Ilia Gruev in midfield, playing the way Bryn Law is teaching us to pronounce his name by rhyming sounds and actions with Johan Cruyff – no hype – Leeds have acquired a new look for 2024, different from November 2023, which itself looked different to the Leeds of August, never mind whatever Leeds were in May.

The passing of time is an underrated factor in the impatient world of football. Farke alluded to it when Rutter’s position changed a few weeks ago, and I wrote about it then, how Rutter’s good play at no.10 now does not mean he would have played good at no.10 three months ago. He needed two things, and the first was, as Farke said, to learn the position. Ask Rutter and he’ll tell you he’s a striker; Farke seemed pretty sure, at the start of the season, he’s a winger. It has taken months of work in training to create the current compromise position, a crash education in the role and its opportunities, and its responsibilities. The other thing he needed was Bamford in the team instead of Piroe, so time was important again, for Bamford’s feet/hips/arse/etc to heal and strengthen.

See also the surprise player of the match, Gruev. We know, from his shoddy performance at Stoke in October, that this was not a case of a player proving his quality with his first opportunity. Instead this dominant display of midfielding, of tackling, intercepting and passing over any distance, was helped by having Glen Kamara as his complementary partner, and by the four-and-a-half months that have passed since he came off the bench for Werder Bremen against Frieburg in the Bundesliga, up from the sixty days between his games in Germany and the Potteries. It has taken a while, but most things do, and in the meantime, Ampadu, Kamara and Gray have been dealing with most of what the Championship has to offer. And now Gruev looks ready to contribute.

How fixed these new places will be over the coming months is up to Farke and fate. But even without signing new players – and while losing two – he has been building new options and new ways of playing from within the current squad. If Gruev can maintain this form – and we do need to see it against a team that’s any good – it gives Farke a choice of where to play Ampadu, and whether to use his passing or Pascal Struijk’s strength at the back. He can choose between sound Byram or frenetic Firpo, if they’re both fit. If a game looks congested, Bamford can make space for Rutter to unlock a defence. If chances are being made but missed, Piroe can come on to score them. 

Time, time, time. These are all Farke’s answers to the calls, whenever Leeds haven’t won this season, to ‘change the tactics’, to try ‘something different’, to come up with ‘a better plan B’. In the actual Championship, using real players, changing the tactics is not as simple as choosing a different formation from a predefined list. Farke hasn’t been ignoring the need for different approaches. But he has needed the time, the training and the fit players to teach to adapt. Maybe it’s easier if your squad has seen it all and done it all – Marcelo Bielsa, when accused of needing too long to integrate new players, used to point out that the better and more experienced a player, the less time they need to learn. Farke has been emphasising the youth and naivety of his squad, and it’s for this reason: we saw last season what plucking Rutter from the Bundesliga and plonking him into the Premier League was good for, ie nothing. If we want this striker-cum-winger to play as a no.10, there’s more to it than telling him to stand in a different place, a lot of work to be done to help him do something he’s never done before.

It’s a long season, anyway. This is something that seems to have escaped Charlie Cresswell, the young centre-back who was publicly criticised by Farke last week for apparently believing a place in the team should be his by natural right. Wrong, says Farke, who reckons players have to keep proving every day in training that if there’s a gap in the team for them, they deserve to fill it. Cresswell reckons he shouldn’t have to wait. But 46 games is a ridiculous number of games for one team to play, and that scale is being felt now in the rise of Bamford, Firpo and Gruev, who were nowhere near this team at the start of the season. Of the sixteen players who got on against Cardiff on the opening day, only six played here for the return. 

That’s not unusual in this long, drawn out league. The season goes on too much and too hard to imagine Leeds, or any team, getting from August to May with one ‘side’. It’s why Leicester manager Enzo Maresca is talking about strengthening his record-breaking squad this January. It’s why Ipswich are scrambling to replace injured goalscorer George Hirst, and hoping their incredible momentum can keep them rolling until the summer. It’s how Southampton can pull their act together and climb to 3rd place, from heavy defeats and loud booing to nineteen games unbeaten.

And it’s why Leeds keep morphing over time, as if they’re playing seasons within a season, maybe named for the centre-forwards in vogue at the time: from the summer days of Gnonto and Gelhardt giving way to the primacy of Piroe, then the epoch of Patrick B. Farke said, before Christmas, that Leeds can still get a lot better, answering as if it was the easiest question he’d been asked all year. This is what he meant: with time to change, Leeds would have time to get better. This January, if they go shopping for full-backs or even more, might be the start of another season, another new look heading for March, April, May. But that’s the other thing about time. A Championship season gives you a lot of it, but will even that abundance, for Leeds, be enough? ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)