Leeds United 2-0 Hull City: Ride the tiger
Gazza? Maradona? Farke, mate, you would have loved Bill Fotherby. But we need to avoid letting the idea of a no.10 become a white whale, chasing an obsession while losing a season to the assumption that no no.10 equals no creativity.
This was supposed to be the afternoon after the night before, a rebuke to whoever had the clever idea of ending the transfer window on the eve of a match. The joyful daylight of association football was here to disinfect all the cash-based tawdriness of Friday's nightfall. And in some ways it was that — a bright 2-0 win over confident visitors from the east coast featuring two snappy goals, all ending amid choruses of olés and singing. Nobody I heard was risking any chants about pumping it up and Leeds going... somewhere, but already the mood was nearer to pre-promotion party than anyone dared anticipate at this stage of the season, so it made sense to step back from a cocky top-two precipice and save the bravado for later.
But Daniel Farke, for one, was not letting the day go by without joining in the past month and more's social media chorus of complaints about transfer window inactivity, using his post-match press conference to describe the new players in his squad as "interesting". I can only assume he doesn't know the English word 'quirky' or he might have opted for that too. "It's perhaps fair to say that we don't perhaps have the brand anymore," he said, "to be the big favourite in this league." That, whatever the particulars of signing a no.10 specifically or not, was not the outcome Paraag Marathe, 49ers Enterprises or anyone would have promised about a summer transfer window. It's one thing for your club's transfer activity to worry the fans. It's another to have your club's manager publicly saying the squad were favourites for promotion before, but since the suits got to work, they are no longer.
That was one way of taking the attention away from a fun afternoon on the pitch. But the fun on the pitch had actually been enhanced by coming at the end of a tiresome week. Manor Solomon, a loanee from Spurs, started the game looking like a better player than anybody else on it and ended his time on it looking tired but with a good assist, setting up Mateo Joseph's first goal as first choice. Largie Ramazani came off the bench looking sharp and ready to score the second goal if Joel Piroe hadn't finished with thrilling, almost chilling calmness. And the latest sub of the new, Ao Tanaka, helped the game end in party mood simply by being new, and heavily voweled.
Some players look, from the moment they take to the pitch, destined to succeed. It's not to underrate Tanaka's talent to point out that his first cheers had little to do with his play. Coming on for Ilia Gruev with a few minutes left, he took the ball, swivelled left and right, ignored a forward pass and played safe out to the wing; it was pure Glen Kamara, in other words, but greeted with raucous cheers rather than frustrated grumbling. He livened up his play from there and five minutes were enough to conclude he's a bargain and a new hero, but the number of songs coming his way from the South Stand — there were at least three different tunes — was an unusual response to a midfielder cruising through some short range passing in a long won game.
That, though, is the other point of the transfer market. Some of it is what Farke was talking about — building a squad that can get promoted. But morale is sometimes an underrated factor in a sport that, in this country at least, relies on enthusiastic audience participation both to encourage the performances and to market the experience. As long as Leeds played reasonably well and won, it didn't much matter if Solomon, Ramazani or Tanaka had outstanding games. The simple fact of their existence was enough to cheer Elland Road up.
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The system of transfer windows works against this simple pleasure. One ideal form of football would include clubs making a new signing every Friday night, just to give the fans something to be excited about every Saturday afternoon. Nowhere does familiarity breed more contempt than in modern football, where a lot of fans are locked between prizing loyalty and longevity from players, and craving novelty, the serotonin of simply having no prior association. A square pass from Tanaka looks fresh and exciting in ways that a square pass from Kamara, at the end of last season, looked drab and made everyone crabby. Gruev is the player with most to lose from Tanaka's arrival, and some of that risk is just from being here for a year already.
Within the system of transfer windows, though, players have to provide more than one week's worth of adrenalin, and that's where the excitement frays and meets Farke. "Interesting players," he called them, "but also players who are not completely proven and mature on this level. And for that I think it's too early to praise them right now ... they have to deliver with this on the mid- and the long-term." Medium term? Long term? What a bore, what a spoilsport. "It's also up to me to work with them in order to get the best out of this group," he added, sounding a touch annoyed that he now has to, like, coach the players, instead of just standing back and watching them being good. "It's a group with not many finished end products, and many many interesting young players." Soz mate. Do your best though.
Farke has a valid point here, especially if 49ers Enterprises were promising to provide him with what he has been saying, since last season and again after this game, that Leeds have been lacking: "A bit of experience, and a bit of proven quality on this level." Promotion with Marcelo Bielsa means one response to this is, Daniel, take the players you've been given, thank your lucky stars Victor Orta isn't picking them for you, and do your job. But our previous promotion to the top-flight was with Howard Wilkinson, who told his chairman, Leslie Silver, that if he wanted promotion he would have to buy it and it would be expensive — the Gordon Strachan, Chris Fairclough, Mel Sterland and Vinnie Jones kind of expensive. Wilko, when he had a goalscoring problem in January, bought Lee Chapman from the top-flight, which annoyed Ian Baird so much he left, so Wilko bought Imre Varadi — from the top-flight — to replace him. When David Batty's inexperience was becoming a problem in midfield, it was a problem no more once Leeds went and got well-travelled Chris Kamara instead.
You can get promoted either way, and either way is fine for fans. 1989/90 was a rush, big players making a big team, at last, in an old stadium remembering how to be home to a big club. And 2018 to 2020 was a deep pleasure of watching players becoming great in front of us. The issue this season, at least as made by Farke's post-Hull commentary, is whether Daniel Farke is being asked to do the job he was expecting. Wilko knew the deal with his board, Bielsa knew the deal with his — until 2021, anyway. And the outcome this season, hopefully, will be that if Farke has to adapt he will adapt, and prove his coaching chops in ways that, even if he wasn't expecting, he'll relish.
It worries me a bit how the concentration on a creative no.10 has filtered from the supporters to the manager. "Especially when an opponent is sitting deeper and parks a bus," Farke said on Saturday, "you need also this creative player. It's never easy when you perhaps don't have this traditional no.10." He invoked Gazza for the second time in a week: "We have perhaps not this traditional Paul Gascoigne no.10, Diego Maradona no.10, but if you don't have it, then you need to work with other tools." Daniel, mate, you would have loved Bill Fotherby. But in the meantime he and we need to avoid letting the idea of a no.10 become a white whale, chasing an obsession while losing the season to the assumption that no no.10 equals no creativity. There are other ways to play. Pablo Hernandez, the player fans yearn to replace as no.10, was a winger. Joe Rothwell has been bringing some brief, thoughtful vibes from the bench. Brenden Aaronson can prosper in this division where half the teams seem, like Hull, to think German managers can get their sturdy backlines to play like Barca circa 2011 (obviously Leeds United are not even slightly guilty of this).
Then there's poor old Joel Piroe, whose goal in this match slightly terrified me. Both goals were, in their ways, a little old-fashioned, not relying on Gazza or Diego style skills. For the first, Solomon took on the full-back, beat him, and whipped a cross to the front post where Mateo Joseph moved and pounced and finished, a goal as much to do with strength and will to put the ball in the net as any fancier stuff. For £40m, for Brighton on Saturday, Georginio Rutter was showing that this part of the game still eludes him: just scoring the fucking goal. At Elland Road there's talk of Joseph learning from Pat Bamford. Let's hope it's actually the other way round.
Then the second goal came from a little Bundesmania from little Brenden at the back, running into trouble then out again and tempting Hull forward in the process. The ball popped to Joseph in front of the benches, and I'm curious how much of his next move was his vision and how much — given he ran to them to celebrate — was following a shout from the coaching staff. Either way he put the ball in front of Junior Firpo as Hull turned back, and his low first time cross went to Piroe on the edge of the box, and then — and then, it looked like a goal as soon as he had the ball, but not, until it was in the bottom corner of the net, as easy as it was. It might get lost amid the outcry for better attackers and new signings, and buried by top corner bangers or the exuberance of Joseph's goalscoring, but this finish could be the goal of the season. 36,000 people were watching but Piroe was in his own separate reality where rolling the ball hot and crisp was his only purpose. This goal is why Farke doesn't worry about Piroe playing as a no.10 without touching the ball, a drifting shadow striker: it's all worthwhile when he floats, evading all markers, to finish chances on his own plane.
We'll always worry about Leeds this season, though, until they score. This game was like that; after being much better than a good Hull for half an hour, not getting a goal off them allowed Hull to show how good they are for a lot of the second half an hour, until Joseph made it 1-0. The first ongoing problem of this summer's transfer window will be that 49ers Enterprises didn't dip for a big morale boosting Gazza/Maradona combined, or failing that, Gus Hamer; a player to lift the mood on nervous days even if only as a multi-million pound placebo. The second is that Daniel Farke, rather than suffer in silence, made the work ahead of him sound more difficult than most fans really want to know about. It's hard to see, after Sheffield Wednesday and Hull have each been dispatched 2-0, what the problem is, what more Leeds need to deal with this division. But while much of that might be down to Farke's work, the nagging doubts that there are still more problems than there ought to be are not just down to the fact of 49ers Enterprises' shopping stopping with Isaac Schmidt, but also down to Farke opting to draw more attention to it.
Maybe he'll be glad to have aired all this when winter comes and he can refer back to it, say he told us so when Tanaka is lost in some Champo quagmire and Joseph can't get a kick without Rutter there passing to him. But it's a rare press conference that ever got a troubled manager out of trouble, especially weeks or months later in a sport obsessed with now and next, especially compared to the sweet short fairground ride of a fun 2-0 win. The biggest statement of Saturday was made by Joel Piroe's right boot. Words, even here where I've written a lot of them, can't compete with that. ⭑彡