Hopefully adapting until they got it right will help the players get it right sooner in future. But hopefully, too, the misplaced self-doubts that sent them into their first half shells will be cast aside as quickly.
Reports of an all-new all-changed all-sensible Leeds United Football Club felt somewhat exaggerated after forty-five minutes of the season's first home game. The boos ringing round Elland Road at half-time were a familiar old tune, a mournful melody of disappointment.
There's a real keenness about heralding the redevelopment of the West Stand as the start of a new era, but the club's wise decision to keep the old stand until there's room in the new one means this is a time of transition, not drama.
Back in May 1992, fans on the old Lowfields were celebrating the league title one Saturday, and the roof was torn down into shreds within ten days. There was no such wreckage around the West Stand this summer. If anything, in parts, it has got a bit nicer. Removing the car parking behind the north and west stands has created wide open pedestrian spaces where before there were chainlink fences and awkwardly parked Bentleys.
Pitchside, Daniel Farke's team put on a first half presentation of all the reasons why everything that is changing is still, so far, the same. Brentford were such appropriate opponents it was infuriating. Their fans won't like, but should I think be proud, that to so many of us they're still a lower-league club with no business bothering the top-flight while the club they support and the team they watch keeps getting stronger and stronger. It fools me every year: they can't be good, they're Brentford, I think, as Thiago swats tacklers aside and Mamadou Sangaré swaggers around the park, probably the Premier League's best new midfielder.
We should be beating them, we're Leeds, I think, as bits of old West Stand paint flake off the concourse walls and our thrilling team full of great nice lads visibly wilt before half-time. No, the old assumptions about football are wrong, and have been for some years now. Brentford looked as good as any team Elland Road has hosted for years.
And Leeds United set our new assumptions straight as well, by reverting into something horribly familiar but also new, a bit strange. Last week I highlighted how Leeds were struggling to make the best of having Harry Wilson to play with, and Farke seemed to agree that the team should be allowed the comfort of starting with old Noah Okafor, leaving Wilson on the bench while Brenden Aaronson did his usual. Which was, terrific effort against the ball to make sure Brentford had no peace, and amazing lack of quality on the ball when given chances to break into attack.
Breaking forward was a big problem for Leeds in the first half, even if it was all the same guys from last season. A few good early moves were soon answered by Brentford, who soon revealed themselves to have more in midfield than Ethan Ampadu and Anton Stach could cope with. It wasn't just Sangaré in there, but Mikkel Damsgaard. He's a fun throwback to Brentford's 1980s Division Four days, when it was more common to find 26-year-old midfielders with receding hairlines. Good for him for not having it sewn back in, Barry Bannan style, but I was growing sick of the sight of that cranium as the game wore on.
What felt new, about a Leeds performance that wasn't really anything new, was that rather than being outmuscled the Peacocks' players just seemed to lose belief in what they were doing. The first battle they lost was with their own attacking plans, and they might as well have had last weekend's Wilson out there because they just weren't linking up in any way. Okafor had a good run, a trick and a cross; then twenty minutes later he had another. The mental frustration spilled over into physical vexation and Leeds became later and later to tackles, further and further from second balls.
Brentford played like they wanted to take advantage, especially after Joe Rodon went off injured. He'd shown signs of some twinge down on halfway, limping it off like he didn't want anyone to notice. Five minutes later he was in the north-east corner on his back, crying, holding his hamstring. Nico Elvedi replaced him, but whether coincidence or not, the long throw immediately following was the first set-piece of Brentford's that Leeds didn't get first contact to. Brentford put their all into the next fifteen minutes and their goal was the culmination of every thing Leeds had felt going wrong for forty minutes. An easy ball behind the offside line, a cross into a box full of static Leeds players, some lazy kicking around by the Bees as defenders stood disconsolately and watched, and a cross played back in for Kevin Schade to finish, audaciously, flicking the ball off his toe into James Trafford's far top corner.
Like the West Stand in summer, more changed at half-time than was immediately apparent. Farke wanted his players to be "braver", and put an end to the passivity that was never a problem last season. He put Wilson on for Aaronson, and Ao Tanaka for Jaka Bijol, meaning Leeds went to a back four with a brand new centre: Elvedi, Trafford and Tarik Muharemovi?. The extra Tanaka in midfield evened that battle up, helped by Wilson willingness to roam deeper than Aaronson and control play from wherever it needed controlling. Leeds, in short, were no longer second to everything. Brentford, meanwhile, for such a free-scoring team lately — ten goals over the last week, a 7-0 over Eintracht Frankfurt in pre-season — looked happy enough slowing the game down with one.
The formation changed again midway through the second half when Dan James and Lukas Nmecha came off the bench. Ethan Ampadu took on Rodon's job on the right of a back three, James worked like a proper wing-back and Stach like an ersatz one, Nmecha helped Dominic Calvert-Lewin who'd had nothing on his own against Kristoffer Ajer and Nathan Collins. The bravery was back and what James and Nmecha added was enthusiasm, and an overloaded right side with Wilson also working there.
When Leeds moved in to equalise, every player bar Trafford was in Brentford's half. Tanaka. strolling in the centre circle, exchanged passes with Elvedi, who put a calm pass wide to James on the right line. Ampadu underlapped him, and twisted James' pass first time into the box; Nmecha, bounding agent of chaos, legged it to the ball between two defenders just outside the six yard box, took a touch and a turn and drilled it into the goalmouth. Calvert-Lewin was there, where he'd skipped away from his markers and was looking along the line, onside to tap in, 1-1.
Nmecha had taken something and made it much more, the reverse of all United's struggles elsewhere. Dan James went through with chances and didn't make the most of them, Leeds' defenders kept set-pieces away but still conceded a goal, the team lined up amid the new season's new optimism built by their own good away games and wilted for half a game.
About his players' half-time, Farke said, "I think they were a bit shocked, and they were a bit, 'We have to be stronger and fight better and win the duels'." Perhaps they, like many of us, weren't expecting Brentford to be so good. It'll be long to Brentford's benefit if other teams keep thinking that way. But Farke's solution is the interesting thing here. The players wanted to fight more, put more effort in; "but if you have a look in the data," Farke said, the players were putting more in than they had against Forest.
"It's hardly possible to outperform Brentford in these terms," he went on. Instead of getting the players to fight more, he had to, "find football solutions and calm them down a bit. They were doubting if they (were) invest(ing) enough. It was no, no, we have to play better football." Which in the second half they did, through several formation changes, "until we then more or less ask the right question" that Brentford couldn't answer.
And hopefully that experience, of adapting until they get it right, will help the players get it right sooner in future. But hopefully, too, the misplaced self-doubts that sent them into their first half shells will be cast aside as quickly. It can be hard to keep up, in a time of flux, but not so much has changed from last season to lose the year's positive momentum. Perhaps not enough has changed to keep it up, from another perspective, but that will be clearer after the transfer window has closed.
