Leeds United 0-0 Brentford: Rehearsal
What “complete performances” like this draw with Brentford and the defeat to Villa actually reveal is the futility at the heart of Marsch’s project. Yes, Leeds are executing his ideas better, but they’re getting better at doing something that will never be good enough.
This game was appropriate to the misty freeze of Elland Road and its attendees’ tired Sunday afternoon brains. Across the Premier League this weekend there were five draws, three of them goalless, as if after what Jesse Marsch says about how, “There is tactics, and playing styles, but ultimately strategies”, there is also the fact it was bloody cold, and maybe that’s what determines results.
I’m not sure a 4-3 (or 3-4) goalfest would have fit the mood in Beeston, and many fans have been pleading for that sort of thing to stop, so to grapple Brentford down to nil — they of the five goals against us back in September — was its own kind of pleasure. This was, in most ways, a normal match. Nothing to be angry about, just low key frustration. Nothing to get excited about, just low key frustration. A draw is better than losing, a point is better than none. A clean sheet is a nice thing to have, if we feel like the audacious pile of talent at the other end can’t finish too many games without scoring. They did here, but, well. Georginio Rutter didn’t come on, did he? “Soon,” said Marsch afterwards, “we’ll really be able to have some fun with the whole group.” Sounds good!
This match wasn’t about fun, it was about Max Wöber. Wöber was bought from (fake) Salzburg the other week for about £11m, a rough modern equivalent to the bit over one million Leeds paid to buy former (real) Salzburg defender Martin Hiden, from Rapid Vienna, in February 1998. Like Wöber, Hiden was expected to be a left-back, but proved to be useful anywhere in defence. And like Wöber, he was simply a good player we were soon glad to have.
Putting the whole Brentford performance on Wöber might be a lot, but he was the big difference in the line-up and an obvious raising of the bar at the back. There were a couple of impressive tackles, either crunching or important, but his quiet authority was more impressive than those. Like one time when Leeds were scrambling around in Brentford’s penalty area trying to force a goal through a forest of legs and the ball was hacked clear, Wöber was in the right place in the centre circle to bring it under control. And that didn’t only happen one time. Anticipating the game and getting into position look like Wöber’s natural habits, and given United’s habit of blundering into dangerous situations and staying there, he could become an important presence. Think where Leeds could be in the table if we didn’t concede stupid goals all the time. We’d have beaten Aston Villa last week, for a start.
Jesse Marsch is convinced this is all part of a larger trend, in which the players are finally matching the idea of how he wants to play with the momentum needed to believe in it. This was behind his lunatic thought experiment in midweek, about how he wouldn’t have minded going down to the Championship after all, because it would have been easier to win games there and build the confidence needed to install his playing ideas. Marsch is convinced that the only problem the Leeds players have is believing in what he wants them to do, and that the only way to build that belief is by winning. I guess he’s got to coach them to win first, though, and I guess that would be — and has been for him — easier anywhere else but the Premier League.
Marsch has been telling on himself with this stuff lately. The impact of Wöber is a good example. He and Robin Koch, he said, “growing up in either Germany or Austria, have had really good formation in terms of understanding tactical responsibilities and nuances ... I knew that about Max before he came, that he’s special that way, very intelligent, very clear with exactly what his role is.” He says that Rutter, too, “was already very up to speed and understands most of” his playing model. In Wöber, at least, we can already see the understanding at work. But what does that say for Marsch’s last ten months of work at Leeds, given that when he’s asked why performances have taken so long to click, he has replied, “I’ve been asking myself the same question”? After the Brentford draw, talking about bringing Wöber into defence, he said, “When you’re in this business, you know what you’re looking at. And for me, for ten months, it’s been about trying to get the group so that we’re really starting to push, real momentum, to feel like on the inside there’s clarity and belief and confidence and understanding.” Maybe it would have been easier just to buy Max Wöber in the first place, and cut out the ten months spent trying and failing — through a pre-season, the pause for the Queen’s death, and the World Cup break — to get the players to achieve full Marsch clarity.