Leeds United 3-0 Birmingham City: Time for a good year

A lot of foolish things can get said or done on a New Year’s Day, when the flip of a calendar makes people vulnerable to seductive changes. This win over Birmingham City came in an attractive wrapper implying that all Leeds United’s problems are over already for 2024. A new year, a new Pat Bamford, a new playmaking Georgi, a new win, a new hope, no new problems. At this time of year it’s easy to exaggerate the differences, like making one trip to the gym in January and ticking the box marked resolved.

Bamford’s goal was not a resolution, but if it doesn’t mean a complete comeback, it at least dragged him out of the void. He got a lot of attention when he unveiled his dyed white hair at the start of December, and it was a pleasure to see that joined, at the start of January, by his fine white teeth. Friends – Patrick smiled. He smiled because he scored a good goal. Not just his first goal since April, but his first goal in a Leeds United win since 23rd May 2021. That was a penalty to celebrate Elland Road’s first post-pandemic crowd for the last game of the season, against West Brom. It was five days before that, at Southampton, when he last scored in a win from open play; the last time he scored from open play in a Leeds United win at Elland Road was also against Southampton, on 23rd February, 2021. In front of a crowd to enjoy it with? The Huddersfield game in March 2020, when the day belonged to Luke Ayling and the night to Covid-19. It really, really, really has been a while.

This goal really was Pat’s goal. The team has not been used to having a target player this season, let alone a bottle blonde one, so when Archie Gray had the ball at his feet Bamford was quick to dissuade him from his usual pass into the penalty area, pointing to Dan James out wide on the right. James knew what to do from there, as Bamford knew he would. Not a little square pass into the box for Rutter or someone to touch and turn on, but a high cross to the back post where Bamford rose, stayed risen, and declared himself resurrected with a header past John Ruddy. In the celebrations he had Rutter for a hype man and a winsome touch to his smile, as if while happy for the goal he’d scored, he still wanted to express regret for all the goals he hasn’t; and that could also have been restraint, remembering the wild celebrations of his equaliser against Brentford in that other lifetime, when he pulled his hamstring. All that history, here, came down to something quite simple: a striker scoring a goal. Later, Bamford hit the post, and later still, he was subbed off to an ovation. It all felt good.

Georginio Rutter was more than hype in this game, but whether it marked his relaunch as the creative playmaker Leeds have been looking for remains to be seen. But it’s tempting to think so, and this was a seductive audition. Behind Bamford, he roamed, swapping positions with James and Crysencio Summerville, making room for Gray coming forward, or Firpo, and making a third goal by chipping a pass into Firpo’s path, from where the ball was squared for a trademark Summerville pick and roll into the corner. He was playful, earning him a fond rebuke from Stuart Dallas in the tunnel afterwards for veering too close to showboating, but I’m not sure if his jogo bonito didn’t end up answering the wrong question about the stubborn defences at Preston and West Brom.

We might have better answers if Leeds had been playing a better team, but Birmingham were awful. Swapping John Eustace for Wayne Rooney should be a warning to everybody about thinking your coach is underachieving when he’s actually holding the team together, except football is already littered with ignored examples of that, every season. We’ll find more out about playing Bamford and Rutter together if it’s tried away – and it should be – and tried against a team that can control a ball, pass it to each other, shoot, or defend, or that doesn’t completely look like a group of players who hate their celebrity manager for working them into the ground in pursuit of the fitness needed to play a style of football they don’t have the ability for. I suspect he’s been sending videos of Ederson to 37-year-old goalie John Ruddy with instructions like, ‘You do that you, lad’, and that Birmingham’s Monday morning decision to remove Rooney from the team WhatsApp group will have caused an outbreak of celebratory emojis.

Rutter, like Summerville, has been a chance factory all season, but not in the dictatorial, dominating way Leeds have been seeking against organised teams on the road. We already knew that, given space, Rutter can seize on opportunities, like when Firpo makes a run behind the defence. The differences against Birmingham looked more due to Bamford than Rutter. Despite their designations on the formations, usually neither Rutter nor Joel Piroe have played as a line-leading no.9, not the way Bamford does it, and their joint false-nineness has tended to make crowded situations around the box more crowded. In the nicest sense Bamford soothed that problem by staying out of Rutter’s way, getting up front into the spaces that meant Birmingham’s defenders had to do more than block, they had to think. With Bamford dragging the Blues away from Rutter and closer to Ruddy, there was more space for United’s attackers to frolic. This was not so much Rutter unlocking Birmingham the way we longed for someone to unlock West Brom, more Bamford sticking a crowbar in the door and leaning, making the gaps United could play through.

These things can come down to chicken and egg questions, but the situation surrounding United’s blocked creativity can be solved this way, by combinations rather than individuals, for as long as Pabloesque dreams go slept on. I’m not sure Rutter, aged 21, is yet playing with the picture in his mind that great playmakers use, those three moves ahead that defenders can’t predict. But, with a bit of space and a full-back on the move, he can do the needful next steps better than most. It’s splitting milliseconds to ask what made the third goal, Firpo’s run or Rutter’s vision – the way Bamford arranged Gray and James for his goal was easier to read. The goal between, finished by Dan James, also had Firpo as its source, giving the ball to Summerville so he could go to the byline and get it back. Maybe it’s Junior with the vision to unlock defences? Even with spectacular individuals, though, these moments are the aim, when players are reading each other and writing the next lines together. Team sport, innit.

It’s also a time sport. Daniel Farke was asked about Rutter’s role after this game, and answered by talking about it as evolution, not breakthrough. Farke said he’s been moving Rutter deeper, game by game, “because we got the feeling he has improved in many, many areas in his game.” Training has made him fitter, so he can roam further for longer, he’s become “tidier” with the ball, he’s learned more “positional discipline (for) where we want him when he plays deeper”, he’s become more confident after the lows of last season. Farke spoke about a process with Bamford, too, not just recovering from his injuries but from, “a period when he was also a bit down and a bit moody due to the situation”. When a plan comes together on the 1st January, it’s tempting to ask why all this wasn’t done much sooner. Farke was explaining, here, how it wouldn’t have worked sooner. “We got the feeling today is the right moment to put him into the mix,” Farke said about Bamford, and with Rutter readier to play deeper, “it also helped (Rutter) to have a target player like Patrick up front”.

Time is always against football teams, for lots of reasons. Fans expect attributes to be represented fully and immediately on the pitch like in computer games (‘Just choose a different tactic!’). What was done yesterday – or in 2021 – is soon forgotten, as careers are made or finished from the ninety minutes happening now. After relegation from the Premier League, parachute payments pour away like sand through fingers, worrying the fiscal side of following a football club. And in the Championship, with 46 games to play, waiting for improvements to come from training has a sharper edge because there’s so little time for the coaches to train the players. Daniel Farke’s insistence on patiently ignoring the league table comes from this, because he has a squad that wasn’t assembled until September, spent much of autumn away on international duties, and has just played nine times in 33 days. “The lads deserve, right now, two quieter days,” said Farke, already being asked about building up to the FA Cup.

Time has kept grinding away at United’s chances of automatic promotion, too. Before playing Swansea at the end of November, the gap to 2nd place was seven points; it’s still seven points, but now Southampton are getting in the way in 3rd and nine games have gone. But even though it’s already 2024, there’s still a lot of time to be getting through, and not much to conclude from two of the year’s first 24 hours at Elland Road. It looks like Leeds now have more than one way of winning at home against a rubbish team coached by a notorious moron, and Farke has evidence that his side is evolving. In the rest of January Leeds are only travelling once for a league game, so answers to that side of their form will be pending for a while. So far, though, it’s been a very good year. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)