Going out of style
This is not to start arguments about one style being better than another, or one manager being better than another. But what people are finding to be faults in Daniel Farke's football would have solved many of the problems people had with Marcelo Bielsa's.
Overall, Daniel Farke has been allowed to do his work beyond the shadow of Marcelo Bielsa. He could thank Jesse Marsch for that, who tried to make himself the torch bearer who would illuminate the darkness of our widowhood, and burned up all the oxygen we could have sucked in to carry the debate further. By the time Farke came to Beeston, Leeds had been 'coached' by Sam Allardyce back into the Champo and it felt like Bielsa had never been here. Farke did not have to deal with following a legend.
But you lose one game at Elland Road and the knives are sharpened and pointed. To Farke's palpable frustration, after taking a team that started with Leo Hjelde and Ian Poveda through record breaking form to 2ppg and the top of the league, everything is being questioned now. Not scoring from corners is an issue, now that Leeds aren't scoring enough from open play. The team's reliance on young, individual attackers — and Pat Bamford — is now a fault, even when Crysencio Summerville's Championship player of the year award suggests it is a strength. This season's lack of goals from midfield has become an issue, as if Ilia Gruev, Glen Kamara and Ethan Ampadu — with just fifteen goals between them ever from nearly 500 career games — had been expected to help United hit Farke's target of 75 goals. Which Leeds hit anyway, with four games to spare.
The uneasiness about this season's style is not strictly new to the stuttering run-in. The cautious recycling of possession between centre-backs and goalkeeper has been deflating from the start. The early season cries for Illan Meslier or Joe Rodon to get on with it have died down, but not into pleasure; Elland Road has settled into a grumpy truce while watching the players walking the ball around, fans hoping for their reward when Summerville or Rutter eventually get the ball and do something amazing to win the game.
But those bouts of boredom have rarely strayed into the revolts that Marsch brought on when we saw how he'd destroyed Bielsa's all-out football before the end of his first home game. It might actually help Farke, though, if we make a comparison now, if not to Bielsa's best days, then to the worst ones, that ushered Marsch in ahead of Victor Orta's schedule. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Farke, his previous Premier League failures and all, had been Bielsa's direct inheritor instead of Jesse Marsch. The complaints about his style of play now answer many of the popular complaints about Bielsa's style before he was sacked.
Well, apart from scoring from corners: Bielsa's Leeds didn't do that either. But the main, urgent desire of the fans watching distraught as Bielsa's team suffered huge reverses at the huge clubs and stupid sucker punches from our rivals was for either Bielsa, or someone in his place, to take all the attacking verve the team was known for and tether it to a stout defensive structure that was not always turning man-to-man marking into nobody-to-shadow. There was a feeling that, unleashed from Bielsa's strict beliefs, players like Raphinha or Joe Gelhardt would become individual matchwinners. Amid the constant hectic attacking, getting a lead and still charging forward to score again, was a perhaps tired wish that the team would just, now and then, put a foot on the ball and take the jeopardy out of the situation, slow the game down and take the win.
This is not to start arguments about one style being better than another, or one manager being better than another. But what people are finding to be faults in Farke's football would have solved many of the problems people had with Bielsa's. If we've lost goals out of midfield, we've gained a structure that has given Leeds the best defensive record in the division. If we've lost the sight of Mateusz Klich racing forward with the ball, we've gained moments of individual skill by letting our wingers off the leash. If we've lost that feeling we even had in the last week of Bielsa, when 0-2 to Salford could become 2-2 in a minute or we could lose 0-4 to Spurs with enough chances to win 5-4, we've gained by avoiding those situations in the first place and keeping more control. If we've lost some of the seat-edge feeling and had to get used to more boredom during games, we've gained more of what many people always said was always more important than Bielsa's dogmatic faith in beauty — wins.
Whether it's fun or not, or likely to work in the longer term or not, are separate issues that feel less to do with Farke than with the football world in general. One thing Bielsa did, as an exceptional proponent of a unique style, was insulate us from trends. Every other team had one thing in common above anything else: that they didn't play like Leeds. First with Marsch and his RB-ball, now with Farke, Leeds have been returned to the conversation about style and tactics as part of the rest of the football world, no longer an anomaly apart.
I'm writing this after watching Pep Guardiola's Manchester City lose the Champions League quarter final second leg, on penalties, to Real Madrid. One of the confounding aspects of this match was how Real Madrid's manager, Carlo Ancelotti, turned it into a high level facsimile of Huddersfield Town versus Leeds United this March. Watching the Citizens was like watching the Peacocks. Totally dominant in possession and field position, recycling the ball from side to side. Midfielders who don't shoot. Individual attackers whose job is to take the ball from those midfielders and try to make something happen by beating their opponent one-on-one or one-on-two. A striker who is hardly involved; big chances getting fluffed. After taking the lead Madrid, like Huddersfield, soaked all that up and didn't wilt, even after an equaliser.
Obviously this match is generating requisite hyperbole, about how Guardiola's tactics are finished less than a year after they delivered a treble. But from Leeds United's point of view, it's interesting to join the dots between how we play and how Manchester City play, and consider a few things. Manchester City also get called boring. Guardiola is also accused of relying too much on individual skill. Both teams suffer from kryptonitis near a parked bus. Even when the football works and the team wins, it's often not felt to be thrilling.
And then, after that, it is time to consider if this style of play has its days numbered after all. There have always been people ready to push Guardiola's football down into its grave, but recently their causes have been supported by evidence. Guardiola's method has been, for years, about taking suffocating control, marked by instructing his players to take "20,000 million passes" to kill the game before trying to score. But draws like the 4-4 with Chelsea and the 3-3s with Real Madrid and Spurs, plus the faddish fascination with Tottenham's 'Ange-ball', have been pushing control out of style, letting a different word dominate tactical discussions.
As Farke is hopefully preparing us for the Premier League with a lite version of how Guardiola patiently builds scaffolding for his individual players to shine, we might have to think about a pop-trend out there calling that style old and out. While, into vogue, comes our old pal: chaos. ★彡
(Originally published at The Square Ball)