Javi Gracia in the maelstrom
Gracia wouldn't give anything away about how Leeds will play at Wolves this weekend, other than he'll be trying to get Leeds doing something that will work. Can't ask for much more than that, right now.
On Wednesday The Athletic did an article about the relegation chances of, effectively, half the Premier League. And people say the top flight isn't exciting! Sigh. That was even before Southampton and Crystal Palace both blessedly lost that night, leaving the bottom eight scrunched into a five point gap. You have to move your index finger up to Aston Villa in 11th to find a club that can reasonably declare themselves safe from relegation. If this season feels unusually worrisome, well, that's because it is:
Relegation battles in the Premier League follow predictable themes and narratives but they are very rarely as tight as this. By this stage of a season, the typical scrap is narrowing down to a smaller clutch of protagonists, all of them scrambling to avoid becoming collateral. Only in 2011 has the gap between 12th and 20th dropped as low as five points from the start of February onwards, and it has never been smaller. If the levels of tension feel extreme then they genuinely are.
On one hand, trust Leeds to be floundering near the bottom of an unprecedented tight relegation scrap. On the other hand, how could Leeds have escaped this, given how much of the league is involved? Well, they planned to. There was Andrea Radrizzani's pre-season idea that relegation would be 'impossible', and the aim Victor Orta spoke about in October of finishing this season between 10th and 14th, next season between 9th and 12th. That target for this campaign — 14th at the lowest end — suggests an assumption that 15th-20th would be the places at risk, while Leeds rose serenely above.
Perhaps this season, pulling 12th to 14th into the mix (and Villa and Chelsea have only recently risen above), is highly unusual. But it's also not wildly unexpected — the margins at the bottom of the Premier League have been closing up just as they've been widening at the top (Blue Mancs in 2nd are eleven points clear of Red Mancs in third, a gap twice as large as covers the bottom eight). And in any case Leeds are 19th so what the hell.
It wasn't just league position that had fans at Elland Road demanding to know what the hell was going on against Brighton last Saturday, using other terms that might not get through your email filter. The style of play was the problem, even if it was the right way to play. Javi Gracia was right — our usual pressing game was exactly what Brighton wanted to face, so denying them their wish and ending the day with a point worked out better for United. But watching Leeds standing off Brighton, letting them have the ball, challenging Albion to do their worst against us, was a dramatic inversion of everything Leeds have been doing since 2018, and it just didn't feel right.