Jon Howe: Calm and comfortable

Jon Howe: Calm and comfortable

Weekly column.

In his latest column for leedsunited.com, lifelong supporter Jon Howe looks back at Monday's win over Crystal Palace.

Howe is the author of two books on the club, 2015 hit ‘The Only Place For Us: An A-Z History of Elland Road’ and ‘All White: Leeds United’s 100 Greatest Players’ in 2012.

Jon Howe

There was a period of serenity during Monday night’s 2-0 defeat of Crystal Palace when it felt like you weren’t watching Leeds United. The mood was calm and accomplished. It was comfortable, it was measured, it was restrained.

You couldn’t help but imagine hordes of enraged neutral fans, triggered by enraged media pundits, jamming the customer service phone lines at Sky Sports subscriptions, and asking “where is the chaos I ordered?” This wasn’t what people had been told to expect from Leeds United, it was putting an established Premier League side to the sword with half an hour and bundles of energy to spare.

In the aftermath of Leeds’ most comfortable win of the season, Marcelo Bielsa explained that a clean sheet “was an objective for today, it was very important we didn’t concede a goal”. Perhaps this revealed the first signs of this team bedding in and becoming more accustomed to their new surroundings. 

After all, not conceding a goal is surely an objective for any football team in any game? The way Leeds play of course invites this consequence as a very real possibility, but it is not part of the plan. People call Leeds ‘naïve’, but it’s not as if being 2-0 down within three minutes at Old Trafford is the design remit. The plan only works when everything within the plan works, if that makes sense, and individual errors have been our downfall at times this season, not the plan itself.

But Bielsa expressing an explicit satisfaction at a clean sheet, and the way Leeds played out the game on Monday, felt like a more carefully-weighted strategy had been put in place. That is not to say Bielsa has decided to change his style – Leeds still attacked at will and could have won at much more of a canter, plus he will resolutely stick to his style even more rigidly in the face of criticism – but something prompted the team to play within themselves in the closing stages, and adopt the kind of miserly possession mentality that wins few friends, but perhaps more prizes.

Maybe he is all-too aware of how a goal against can upset a team’s mentality, and 2-0 is a habitually delicate lead? Maybe there was no discernible threat from the opposition, and with injuries, a threadbare bench, the new pitch and Arsenal on the horizon, it made sense to save a couple of gears in the circumstances?

All this seems noticeably un-Bielsa, but we shouldn’t necessarily conclude he has conceded those sacrosanct principles etched in gold leaf and is finally hiding his light under a bushel. Maybe, instead, Leeds are simply growing more accustomed to the Premier League, are maturing as a team, are showing more strings to their bow and deserve a little credit for that?

Most seasons of note contain a watershed moment - we have just passed the anniversary of last season’s with the defeat at Nottingham Forest - and perhaps December’s defeat at Manchester United was that for Leeds this time around. Since then we have played eight Premier League games and won five of them, the three defeats in between have shown some of those same characteristic traits that needed ironing out, but undoubtedly the heat on Bielsa and the mostly wilful misunderstanding of what he is about hit its heights post-Old Trafford, and that must have stung. As an honourable man, Bielsa will not have wanted the negative attention on him deflecting onto the team or the club itself, and whilst not every game since has illustrated a marked improvement, as lines in the sand go, that 6-2 defeat was a vivid and painful one.

In vastly contrasting circumstances, the last rites of the 2-0 win over Crystal Palace allowed me to chat with my friend on Microsoft Teams about his new kitchen extension, it was the 2021-lockdown version of that indecipherable chatty murmur that reverberates around Elland Road, as the team coasts to victory in the background whilst 35,000 people bask in the pressure valve finally being released and discuss what their plans are for Saturday night. It was a rare moment of calm, and an opportunity to actually savour a victory whilst it was happening, rather than watch through your fingers and recoil in horror as wily midfield generals beat the press and make cutting inroads, or world class forwards scatter our defence asunder like skittles.

But then this wasn’t our only comfortable victory in recent weeks.  The win at Leicester was widely regarded as our best of the season and a ‘big’, all-round performance which prompted many observers to reconsider their tired and one-dimensional trope about Bielsa’s approach and this team’s capabilities. It shifted the accepted wisdom and answered a thousand lazy arguments in the most emphatic way.

There were signs in that Leicester game that Leeds were being more considered in how they used the ball and how they retained their shape, perhaps picking and choosing when to attack, rather than losing all sense of restraint like your Dad when the all-inclusive buffet opens. I dare say this was the plan versus Everton too, but two defensive lapses threw that idea out of the window. As any parent knows, you have to let them make a mistake or they will never learn. Perhaps now Leeds are learning, but that doesn’t mean they won’t make another mistake along the way.

Even though our defence is not as strong as it could be, it is finally settled and it is showing. And if that allows Leeds to play games out with unruffled authority rather than invite unnecessary trauma, then as Leeds fans we’ll take that for now, even if it’s a brief but uncomfortable reminder of the mundanity that fans of other clubs have to put up with every minute of every game.

Let’s not forget, we know that this team can turn it on at the drop of a hat, and on Monday night it was clear they had already done enough. So take a breather lads, you’ve earned it, because growing up in public isn’t easy and becoming savvy operators in the Premier League is even harder.   

X