13th September 2025. English Premier League.
That old London curse seems to be back with a vengeance, or perhaps it never really went away. Nine consecutive Premier League defeats in the capital would suggest so. Once again, it wasn’t that Fulham were particularly all that much better than Leeds, it was just that at a crucial moment the luck, or maybe the quality, deserted us.
Leeds managed 10 goal attempts in this game, not great I admit but Fulham mustered just 5, and both sides hit the target three times. Both sides managed three corners apiece too. The only thing that looked like separating these sides for much of the game was that the home side had just a smidgeon more quality in the final third. Hence our three shots on target hardly troubled Leno in the home goal while, for Leeds, it needed two world class saves from Karl Darlow to keep out a thunderous Harry Wilson free kick and a wonderful curling shot from substitute Kevin.
In defence, Leeds again looked mostly solid, generally untroubled, and in midfield we mostly held our own but, once again, the lack of someone taking control in midfield, someone able to play a killer ball or come up with a piece of magic, was missing, and so any half-chances we did conjure up were exactly that, half-chances that didn’t really give the forwards much hope of scoring from. None the less, Leeds did enough in this game to deserve a point I thought, and, for 94 minutes, that looked how it would pan out. But the football equivalent of the grim reaper was just biding his time.
Referee Craig Pawson, as usual, didn’t do a particularly good job throughout the game in my opinion, his decisions were random, as were his yellow cards, and on a few occasions he overruled his assistants even though they looked to be better placed to decide on throw-ins. At one point he unfathomably allowed Fulham to continue an attack that ended with a Smith Rowe shot striking the foot of a post, only to then bring back play for a foul on Ethan Ampadu! He awarded an astonishing 35 free kicks too in what was hardly a feisty game.
It was almost inevitable then that we’d fall foul of the refs idiosyncrasies eventually. And so it was. The ball went out of play near the dugouts on the Fulham left and the liner on that side raised his flag in our direction, only for the very poor Pawson to overrule him again. Fulham took the throw, Kevin collected, played a lovely one-two on the corner of our box and that was when he curled that shot towards the top right corner. Darlow brilliantly touched it over the bar. Step up Lady Luck, wearing white (we were in black of course today!).
For all our supposed concentration on set pieces, corners in particular, we still don’t look confident against them and, once again, this was our undoing, just as it was twice against Arsenal in this neck of the woods. Over came the corner from the Fulham right, Joe Rodon seemed paralysed as he failed to jump, and the ball instead came to the unsuspecting Gabriel Gudmundsson, ten yards out at the back post. The ball arrowed past Darlow off the Swede’s head. It was an old-school Leeds moment, a shooting ourselves in the foot moment. We haven’t witnessed these much over the last two seasons but we Leeds fans of a certain age are well used to seeing them of course.
Leeds began this game with an all changed forward line of Aaronson, Calvert-Lewin, and Noah Okafor but still the goals eluded us – just one penalty scored plus that moment of magic from Jayden Bogle in the cup tie at Hillsborough so far this season. I’m not sure if our problem is the forward line itself or whether it’s that oft lamented lack of a visionary ‘10’ in the squad. Last season we made up for that with dynamic players out wide – Manor Solomon and an on fire Dan James. We currently have neither of those, Manor is no longer with us and Dan seems miles off his best form. Noah Okafor shows glimpses of quality and maybe it’s still too early to expect miracles from him, and now we seem likely to be without DJ anyway after he picked up another injury today.
Using Brenden Aaronson out wide doesn’t work for me, he’s willing enough but he’s no winger and he continues to look far too lightweight – often winning unlikely challenges but then being brushed off the ball too easily. In many ways our performances feel similar to this time last season, stuttering and failing to just fire up properly.
We have some time to sort it out, but not too much. We have to find a better formula, just as we did after four or five games last year. Next week we go to the Molineux, a game that looks like the sort we have to be winning if we really are to hold our own in this division.
