Sunderland 1-0 Leeds United: We can’t just be normal

It’s turning out that we picked a bad year for our weird, infuriating football club to start being the one thing we’ve craved all century: quite normal. You can tell the story of Leeds United since the millennium by pointing to any date on the calendar and asking, why couldn’t we just have been normal? But now normal is here, normal might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Marcelo Bielsa did not save us, and the Premier League did not change us. Only at Leeds could a manager carrying the decades old nickname of ‘El Loco’ come to seem like a balm of sanity on the cracked nerves of our club. Of the four managers who tried to follow him last season, two are now podcasters, one is manager of Lincoln City, and the other seems to have just given up. None could cope with how the frenzied neuroses of Andrea Radrizzani, Victor Orta and Jesse Marsch combined to catapult United as far from safety as they could. Imagine Marsch trying his quivering ‘let’s not be stressed, guys’ on Orta, while Radrizzani was squealing angry tweets aloud and Angus Kinnear wept down the phone to Sam Allardyce, telling him he missed what they had at West Ham. They were putting the dismay in dysfunctional even before Chris Armas knocked on the door to ask for his pay.

Things have changed since the summer, and the executives at Leeds now have LinkedIn profiles resembling professional resumes, where Jesse Marsch’s looked like a cry for help. Paraag Marathe is impeccably presented, and his associates Morrie Eisenberg and Robbie Evans have emulated him perfectly by not presenting themselves at all. Gretar Steinsson and Nick Hammond have popped up with the players Daniel Farke fancied – a Spence here, a Rodon there, a sprinkling of Ampadu, Kamara and Piroe – while together they muted any potential mutiny as Gnonto was almost led off the ship. The message being sent from the backroom is almost paranoiacally clear and consistent: we are NORMAL PEOPLE who are running a NORMAL FOOTBALL CLUB in a VERY NORMAL WAY, and the back office is backing the front office, which is fronting. Everybody is here to find players, help them win games, sell tickets and shirts, get promoted, and build a bigger stadium. And nobody is going to panic and get Neil Warnock in here if it looks like taking longer than six months.

Which is where the awfulness of all this rears its head. United’s 1-0 defeat at Sunderland was a very normal Championship result from a very normal Championship game. Two good teams playing fairly well, frustrating each other, hoping for individual brilliance in attack, getting it instead in defence – big saves by Anthony Patterson and Illan Meslier – until the game was settled by a moment’s lapse into ricochet. It was only the Peacocks’ fourth defeat of the season, and last season Sheffield United were promoted while losing eleven games, the season before Fulham were champions while losing ten. The defeat put United’s points average down to 1.95 per game, but beating Coventry this weekend would put it back up to exactly 2. Last season Sheffield United’s average was 1.98. Fulham’s title winning rate was 1.96. When we went up, in 2020, it was with 2.02 points per game, ahead of West Brom and their 1.8. If Leeds United want promotion this season, even taking Sunderland into account, Daniel Farke and the team are going about it in a very normal way.

What the absolute hell, then, about Ipswich Town and Leicester City above us? They both have points averages above 2.4. At the rate they’re going, they could both break Reading’s Championship points record of 106. It’s a freakshow, a Premier League – League One sandwich with Leeds United’s tilt at normality not so much stuck in the middle as being squeezed out and down the sides, leaving an auto-promo top two of bread slices crammed together. Only a weirdo would eat that but it’s on the menu for 2024 and Leeds are being made to suffer for knuckling down and, for the first time in years, putting their pants on the right way round before leaving the house. We are as near to faultless as we have been for years but somehow, still, Ipswich and Leicester’s incredible form has got to be our fault. In a normal season, messing up in midweek in the north-east could be shrugged off as an inevitability due to being broadcast on Sky Sports and life in general. These things happen, even to very good teams, and nobody should expect to get through 46 matches without at least a few like this. But then we look up the table, and wonder what exactly we did to deserve being 3rd. To encounter one team with 100 points in the Champo may be regarded as unfortunate. To meet two looks like carelessness.

There’s an old truism of Howard Wilkinson’s that all a team can do is play as well as it can, and if it does that, it will get what it deserves. It’s how Leeds won the league in 1992. Their opponents at Old Trafford might have had better players in theory, but Leeds United’s players ignored all that, played as good as they could, and triumphed. All you can ask of a team, in Wilko’s view – and I think Bielsa shares this – is to do everything it is capable of. Neither would ask players to do anything they could not do – there’s no point asking a slow player to run fast, or a short player to dominate in the air. The team’s job is to get the most out of its resources, and if they do that, nobody can ask for more. If those resources aren’t enough, it’s up to the manager to have a word with the chairman, about adding to them.

In that sense Farke has Leeds spot on so far. Since the transfer window closed, he’s got 2.17 points per game out of the squad he got. He’s overhauled the slow start, raising the season average overall to 2. He’s staying focused, refusing to become ‘addicted’ to the league table, telling everyone that April is the time to start worrying about that. He has a squad that is capable of automatic promotion. He’s getting results that are good enough for automatic promotion. Everything else is just propaganda. But that doesn’t make it any easier to ignore.

Two questions get raised by nights like this, neither of which Farke will be keen to entertain. One is about whether he really is getting everything he can out of the squad he has. The games Leeds have not won this season have all been like this, frustrating occasions when they looked capable of being better than the other team but, despite all their attacking talent, couldn’t find a way to prove it. When it comes down to doing what you should, fielding Piroe, Rutter, Summerville and James, and adding Gnonto, Anthony, Bamford and Joseph, and not scoring a goal, feels like falling short. Perhaps it’s normal – few teams can score in every game, and Leeds scored in all the previous seven – but it has happened often enough for it to feel like Farke should have better answers against a packed defence than adding more strikers, like a baker trying to sweeten their cake mix by pouring in a vatful of sugar.

The second question is about how Farke, and the suits and ties in the office behind him, should be responding to what Ipswich and Leicester are doing. Farke is doing his job of getting two points per game out of his squad. That was the target, and he’s hitting it. Do Leeds stick with the plan, believing that one or both of the top two will stumble under the weird weight of their own accumulation? Or should Farke’s targets be reset upwards, to take on the top two at their ridiculous pace? Should Marathe be asking Farke how come Kieran McKenna is outcoaching him with a team out of League One? Should Farke be asking Marathe for the creative attacking midfielder the club didn’t sign in summer, maybe a full-back or two?

These aren’t unusual questions when a season is reaching its centre, when a transfer window is opening soon. But they’re questions Leeds were hoping to avoid this time. For once the club, setting out to be normal, is achieving it. And it’s not enough. By choosing steadiness, they’re risking losing their bounce-back opportunity to a season going crazy around them. Which makes the older, more familiar option feel viable: getting weird again. Loosening the ties and rolling the dice. Browsing Ligue 1 for a playmaker, inviting them here on a private jet. Riffling through the loan market for a dulled gem. Changing the tactics. Changing the team. Putting Ilia Gruev up front or something. Getting Farke to do his hair like Pazza Bamfs. Something, anything, to shake things up. It’s everything we’ve never wanted Leeds to do. I kind of miss us now we’re not doing it.

When Farke arrived, with orders to take Leeds back to the Premier League, I worried a little about us becoming what we’ve never been: a normal club, a Norwich, content to yo-yo, settling into the groove carved by clubs shuttling between the top two flights. It doesn’t feel like us, somehow. Mostly, it feels like we’ve avoided that fate, particularly when Rutter or Summerville are producing magic on the pitch. But I can still sense the strings pulling us in that direction, tugging us towards sensible owners, disciplined managers, comfortable mid-table finishes, new revenue generators in place of Elland Road’s old stands. Those are supposed to be the prizes. I don’t even know how much I want all that tranquil life at Leeds United, so it’s kind of reassuring that it looks like getting it might mean, first, getting crazy again. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)