Nottingham Forest 1-0 Leeds United: This isn't going very well

Clarity. Clarity and stress. They're two of the words that will haunt us, Jesse Marsch's ghosts, long after he's gone. Like Paul Heckingbottom left us 'Wi' t'ball, wi'out t'ball'. (Until Marsch gave body to those ethereal breaths and brought them back to life.)

Anyway, I'm not sure how you go about forcing clarity onto another person, and neither it seems is Marsch. But if it's not clear to the Leeds United board that things are just not working out with Marsch in charge of the football team, then perhaps a thought experiment might help them: imagine the feeling of stress released when he's no longer the problem here. There. Andrea, Angus, Victor, Paraag and Peter too, just picture the day when he's gone and I bet you fifty pence each that just the thought of it will lift your shoulders, smooth your brows, lighten your moods. There is one clear way to remove the stress from Leeds United and, after eleven months of trying the other way, it has to be worth a go.

Obviously it won't solve everything. Sacking the manager might be the easy answer in football, but it always masks other important issues that need solving. Sacking Marcelo Bielsa, for example, did not release the team from its defensive difficulties and catapult the club up the table. But because few of us can see behind the scenes of a football club, few of us know what the other problems are, and as such, we can't criticise the board for those, and that's to their advantage. Sacking the manager is a great stress reliever because even if it doesn't solve all the problems, from outside it looks like it does. Basically, lads, you might get some peace, and by the time fans have worked out about the other stuff, you could be gone.

We can't see behind the scenes. But we can see what's on the pitch. And, eleven months into the job, two weeks after Marsch told us that "on the inside our confidence is moving absolutely forward, and for me, I'm at the highest belief I've been since I've been here", the football is barely distinguishable from what we saw on that shocking first night at Elland Road against Aston Villa, in the dreary 0-0 away to Crystal Palace, in the nauseating trio of self-defeat against Manchester City, Arsenal and Chelsea. Three stoppage time wins, a stoppage time draw, and a more ordinary win and draw from Watford and Southampton were enough to keep Leeds up overall, but Joffy Gelhardt plays for Sunderland now. We were promised, in Marsch's first answer of his first press conference before the first game of this new season, that Leeds would be working "in a little bit more stress-free environment ... so that we can now transform ourselves into what we want to be."

After losing to Nottingham Forest, Marsch was asked how he was going to turn his belief that Leeds can get results into actual results:

"I can see why you frame your question the way you do but if you're not with us every day, then you don't understand how we feel. Everyone is aligned and obviously when we don't get results that puts stress. Then we have to manage stress. Instead of managing development we're managing stress. Too often since I've been here that's what it has felt like, and then it obviously interrupts any kind of process that you try to create."

So much for the "little bit more stress-free environment". So much, too, for Andrea Radrizzani's summer comment that relegation would be "impossible". I think, being charitable to him in his second language, he meant something closer to "unimaginable", but the result is the same. And the result is Illan Meslier attacking a corner in stoppage at time in Nottingham, trying to steal a desperate point from a relegation rival.

The concentration on Marsch's press conferences is, to an extent, unfair, but it's built in to the Premier League in which he works. Personally, I would love English football to give journalists the same locker room access as the NFL or MLB, where the press can ask detailed post-match questions to any player willing to answer them. I'm with Antonio Conte when he wonders why directors of football don't do press conferences about transfers, why physios aren't asked about injuries. In England, apart from three-and-done bits for TV with the player of the match, it's managers who are dragged out to speak before and after every game, managers whose words are dissected and criticised, managers who are up against the sack clock week by week because football media is a huge industry and is given nothing else to fill its maw.

But Marsch's commentary on his own work is different, and I'm not sure I've ever heard a coach talking himself out of a job this way before. Since football resumed after the World Cup, and Leeds offered some slightly brighter performances, Marsch has seemed to seize on those as a light at the end of the tunnel — he can't explain why it's taken so long to get here, but now we can almost see the sky. But all this did was to emphasise how long this tunnel has been, and how difficult Marsch has found getting from one end to the other, even with a map. Why has it taken ten months to achieve acceptable performances? "That's a good question and one that I've been asking myself," he said, "and I've been trying to urge the players and demand them to play with more clarity and more commitment to the tactical idea of the way we want to play". Yes, without succeeding. After declaring in August how important a new stress-free environment is to what he's trying to achieve, what's the reason being given in February 2023 for the team's lack of development? He's "managing stress too often", and that's interrupting the "process".