Leeds United 1-1 Blackburn Rovers: Rodonball in hell
Farke finally realised that Eustace was pushing Leeds into a Rodon-dominated hell and that the answer to how the hell he was going to score against John anyhow was by going to hell himself and getting Rodon out.
Before Leeds United played Blackburn Rovers on New Year's Day, manager Daniel Farke was asked whether, after two Championship titles with Norwich City, it was important to him to win a third with Leeds, or if he'd be happy with promotion. "If you win the title," he replied, "if we want to get promoted, my only focus is: how the hell can we score a goal against John anyhow?"
John Anyhow is better known as John Eustace, Blackburn's manager, and Farke was referring to his Leeds team's three consecutive 1-0 defeats to Eustace, home and away to Blackburn and once last season at Birmingham City. Birmingham's celeb-dazzled owners, incidentally, must have felt a twinge of new pain when their pick to replace Eustace at their team, Wayne Rooney, was sacked by Plymouth Argyle last week. Not only did Rooney send their club on the way to League One, but he's failed to give them any right-guy-wrong-time rationale now he's messed up Plymouth just as badly. Unless, that is, Tom Brady and co were playing a long game by getting involved with a top-of-League One battle for promotion with the glamourhounds at Wrexham, although if they were that clever they wouldn't have played the first seven games of the season with Bailey Peacock-Farrell in nets (Ryan Allsop has taken over and cut the number of goals against them in half, so they do learn).
Hell of a non-BPF kind was on Farke's mind before this game. As well as how the hell to score a goal against John, he said he'd also been asking, "how the hell can we be successful this season when we lose so many key players" in the summer? And, before the season began, "how the hell can I win the first game anyhow?" And anyhow, Farke now has answers to those questions, and even a Leeds United goal scored the hell against John Eustace, satisfying that focus and adding to the four his Norwich put past QPR when Eustace was caretaker there.
The hell goal, however, did not come easily to Leeds. Football did not come easily to Leeds on a cold, frustrating, tiresome afternoon that started under bright skies but dragged on and on through more than 106 hellish minutes of so-called play, Rovers conspiring to not play for 33 of those minutes. They spent eight-and-a-half minutes taking throw-ins. All this, calculated by LUFCData, compared to 18 minutes 39 seconds when Leeds had the ball but weren't kicking or throwing it. This is what we get, I suppose, for going to Elland Road to watch a visiting team that included Andreas Weimann, Lewis Baker and Danny Batth, and one of their particularly Championship tactics was picking fights with some of Leeds' littler boys — Brenden Aaronson, Joel Piroe — then having a teammate whack them hard off the ball. There might be an argument in here that Birmingham were right to sack John Eustace for this sort of nonsense, except part-owner Tom Brady played American Football so he should be used to standing around bored on a cold pitch, and also Blackburn are 7th and mithering the play-offs while Birmingham are not.
Blackburn's other tactic was, superficially, one we know well, a sturdy 5-5-0 formation that doesn't extend much further than its own penalty area. This wasn't quite that, though, as when Rovers had the ball they showed strong interest in taking it forward and doing something or other. They seemed a bit vague about the last part, missing Todd Cantwell. There was more to how they stopped Leeds than a simplistic parked bus, too. They weren't mindlessly letting Leeds have the ball while they hid in their own box like, say, Wayne Rooney's Plymouth when they came to town. Instead Rovers were skilled at making sure the Leeds player on the ball, more often than anyone, was Joe Rodon. And that Joe Rodon was having a hell of a time with it.
Poor Joe. He usually has the ball a lot anyway, which is one of many people's objections to how Daniel Farke has Leeds playing. Rodon and Pascal Struijk are often the top ball-touchers when you go through the possession stats, and nobody wants to see centre-backs on the ball that much. It's presumed to be a fetish of Farke's but nobody, I think, was more pleased about how much possession Rodon had than John Eustace. Or less pleased than Big Joe. With the ball at his feet he tapped, he turned, he cajoled, he pleaded, and early on — as he does early in most games — he overhit a long ball down the line for Jayden Bogle then tore at his hair and stamped his feet and rended his garments. And Rovers' slow torture of Rodon became a big cause of Leeds slowing right down, as he got the ball over and over and had nobody to give it to who wouldn't just give it him back, over and over.
Statistically, Rodon has had more possession in several games this season. But as a proportion of the team's total possession, he's only had more of United's play once: away to Blackburn. At Ewood Park, Rodon had 16.1 per cent of Leeds' total number of touches; on New Year's Day, he had 15.8 per cent. An additional guide to Blackburn's plan, and United's struggles, comes when you compare his possession to Ao Tanaka's. In fifteen full games together in 2024, Tanaka had more ball than Rodon in seven, and of those Leeds won six and drew one (at Preston). When Rodon has had more ball than Tanaka, Leeds have won three, drawn three and lost two. The difference in their time on the ball has only been greater than four per cent three times, though: when Rodon had 5.3 per cent more than Tanaka in the 2-2 draw at Sunderland, when Rodon had 5.7 per cent more in the 0-1 defeat to Blackburn at Ewood Park, and 4.4 more in the first seventy minutes on New Year's Day. Rodon, in fact, had 17 per cent of the Leeds team's touches in that time.
As if there's nothing new in the game, this brought to mind Howard Wilkinson's tactic against Liverpool's centre-back Phil Babb, recounted by his assistant Mick Hennigan in Dave Simpson's excellent book, The Last Champions: 'Let him have the ball — cos he'll give you it back'. This wasn't quite the case with Rodon against Blackburn, as he completed 93 per cent of his passes, but it's the same logic about who you want on the ball. In his time on the pitch, Joe Rothwell only had the ball 10 per cent of the time, compared to Rodon's 17 per cent. Rothwell normally puts eight or nine passes into the final third, but against Blackburn it was three — one of them leading to a shot, demonstrating why Rovers didn't want him to have the ball. This was the first time he'd played less than nine attacking third passes in a game since — well, since last time Leeds played Blackburn, when in eighty minutes he found four, creating one chance.
Farke seems to have realised that Eustace was, for the second time in a month, pushing Leeds into a Rodon-dominated hell and that the answer to how the hell he was going to score against John anyhow was by going to hell himself and getting Rodon out. Maybe Farke was feeling the pitchforks poking at his hot feet already. Aaronson had been worried by a black eye after he was struck by an arm off the ball in the first half. Sam Byram, overworked, ill and old, was apparently shivering and pale and complaining of aching feet at half-time, so Max Wöber replaced him. Within minutes, Bogle had a dead leg and he was off for Ethan Ampadu. With only three subs remaining for the whole match Farke's pre-plans were rubbed out, and with Eustace smugly roasting Rodon by forcing more of the ball on him than prime Zidane could cope with, Farke might have thought the thing to do was to shock the hell out of John.
Manor Solomon was shocked, for one. He'd just skinned his full-back the way Dan James hadn't all game, pushed a low cross through the six yard box and remembered, appalled, that he doesn't play with Son Heung-Min anymore. Farke's argument was, I guess, that Solomon'd had seventy minutes when he could have been doing that, and said he wanted to try a left-footed player to cross from the left, which might have been why for a while in the first half Bogle-James and Solomon-Byram had swapped wings. After Solomon had grumpily gone the left-footed winger was now Max Wöber, with Dan James also converting to wing-back; there was a back three, Tanaka on his own in midfield, and a front four including Pat Bamford and Mateo Joseph directly in front of Wilf Gnonto and Brenden Aaronson, all playing centrally. Farke has thrown attackers at his problems before, of course, but with Largie Ramazani on the bench and Solomon taken out of the equation, John Eustace was probably not expecting whatever the hell this was, anyhow.
Whatever it was worked, to an extent, in two ways. First, for the rest of the game, Rodon was only having a much more reasonable amount of possession, taking 25 touches compared to Tanaka's 24; Gnonto, James, Ampadu and Struijk all had more than 20 as the ball was shared around more evenly and the forwards started getting more. Secondly, Leeds scored the hell past John. It was a penalty, calmly finished by Struijk after Joseph was brought down in the box after an interesting sort of cross by Wöber was flicked about by Bamford. Interesting because, yes, it came from his left foot on the left, but it came because he isn't a good enough player to have done anything else with the ball as it went down the line. Solomon has the ability to have caught up with the ball, controlled it, stepped on it, turned, swivelled inside, looked for a pass, picked one, and played it with care. Wöber can't do any of that stuff so had no choice but swinging his left hoof and getting the ball towards the penalty spot. The Rovers' defence, well prepared with video footage of United's wide players twisting and turning, may not have been expecting this post-hipster John McClelland lumbering down their wing and banging crosses into the mixer, and that may be why they put Mateo Joseph on the floor.
We can't know for certain if this was a masterclass from Farke, opting for a tactic Eustace couldn't have seen coming, or just luck born of circumstances. We can't say for sure that it was the deciding factor, either, as United's best virtue in this stage of this game was wanting desperately to succeed at what they were doing. You couldn't fault their effort, the great bunch of lads. Until, that is, they committed their gravest sin of thinking, for a moment after scoring, that they had succeeded, which was the moment when Rovers' countered down Wöber's unguarded wing, won a corner, and scrambled an equaliser amid United's Byramless, clueless, set-piece disorganisation. I'll give the players some more credit for how they went right back to their task of moments before, giving their all for as much of the twelve minutes left after this 88th minute exchange of goals as they could. But if you could just concentrate, lads, and keep the hard fought three points when they're in your grip, that'd be great.
We also can't praise Farke for putting forward this solution to scoring the hell past John when it has not only taken him almost four full games to find it, but he said afterwards he had it in his mind straight after half-time, when Bogle had to go off injured. Gnonto had warmed up then as well as Ampadu, and they both stripped off with Rothwell also a candidate to go off. But only Ampadu came on. "When I was forced to substitute Jayden off, I had to change the approach," Farke explained. "I was thinking about two changes but then I thought about it being taking too much risk. I wanted to see how the game developed. Initially I was thinking about doing it straight away."
The path to hell is paved with good intentions, and the road to home draws is paved with cautious non-subs, and it will be hell if we have to play John Eustace's Blackburn Rovers in the Championship ever again. I wouldn't be too keen on it in the Premier League, either. ⭑彡