The path to 105 points is through Ethan Ampadu's knee, probably
If away form was that easy, Leeds United would have been the first Premier League champions as well as the last First Division champs.
Leeds United's away form has already ruined Christmas. The last match before the big day should be an easy win over Oxford United at Elland Road as the Oxen have only managed two draws themselves away from their hometown spires and have just sacked their manager who, while he wasn't Denis Smith (although in my mind he was and always should be), he was as popular. A brisk Beeston beating is in order, then off for some mulled wine, some warmth, and to moan about how Leeds will probably go and lose in Stoke and Derby anyway. Bah, humbug, etc.
It's a fair moan because if the travelling travails weren't troubling Leeds we'd be enjoying one of the all-time greatest seasons right now. It's like one hundred per cent cloud cover during a once-a-century eclipse. United's home form is so good that, if it was being repeated away, they'd be earning 2.55 points per game and on track for 117 points for the season. Heck, at this stage we'd already have 54 points and be nine points clear of Sheffield United (and probably still nervous). If 2.55ppg kicked in from this point onwards Leeds would be heading for 105 points and we could be talking about this team as one of the all-time great Championship sides, up there with (checks notes) Steve Coppell's Reading. Instead we're trudging along with a thoroughly mundane 2ppg and heading for a boring old 92 points.
One pertinent point is that, as the Championship is becoming as mismatched as the Premier League, teams coming down from the top flight are more routinely hammering everybody and the points total needed for promotion is correspondingly going up. Daniel Farke may need to update his league ladders to reflect this because 90pts weren't enough for automatic promotion last season, or the season before — when 92 would have just scraped 2nd place. His Norwich sides were champions with 94 and 97 points, so he could allow Leeds some higher horizons, but equally, expecting teams to routinely maintain more than 2ppg just to get anywhere isn't a sign of a healthy league. It also increases expectations to the point that fans look at how simply doubling up on home form would win the league by eleven points more than any other team in history and think, well yeah, that's what we want.
If only it was that easy, Leeds United would have been the first Premier League champions as well as the last First Division champs. Instead Howard Wilkinson's title winners finished 17th in their next campaign, just two points away from relegation, and everybody remembers them as the team that sold Eric Cantona and fell apart. It's not that simple, though, because while they famously couldn't win away that season — and didn't win away in the league for 24 matches between April 1992 and September 1993 — the title defence at Elland Road was as strong as it had been in the previous three. In 1992/93 Leeds won 12, drew 8 and lost just once at home. If they'd repeated that form away, Leeds would have earned 88 points and been champions by four points ahead of their foes from Old Trafford.
The reasons for this get at the heart of the eternal mystery around home and away form, in that there were simple and verifiable causes but they should have been the same wherever Leeds played. The big thing was the new backpass rule that meant defenders couldn't just pass the ball into their goalie's hands anymore, and this is one of my favourite hobby-horses about this era, freshly relevant this week as everybody points at Fraser Forster and laughs: the problem was not that John Lukic went into a panic anytime the ball came near his feet. The real problem was actually identified during pre-season by captain Gordon Strachan, when he was co-commentating on Leeds' pre-season Makita Tournament match against Stuttgart:
"In a normal match situation, the ball may have been passed back to John (Lukic). John picks the ball up, wastes five or six seconds, tells his team-mates to get up to the halfway line, then plays it up there. And we hit Chappy and there's only about twenty or thirty yards to play in. When that (backpass) happened there, the game was still spread out."
The problem was not Lukic's feet but time, and space, further up the pitch. When the ball was in their keeper's hands, the other players would all stroll away up near centre-forward Lee Chapman to play off the second ball, ready to use the offside trap to stop any counter attacks. Now, because Lukic had to kick the ball straight away, the players didn't have time to get up around Chapman so they weren't winning his knockdowns, and the defenders didn't have time to get up to halfway so they had opponents running at them all the time on the edge of their area. Basically, because they couldn't use Lukic's hands to slow the game down and reset upfield, the back four were penned back under pressure like they never had been before.