Leeds supporters were calling for Jesse Marsch’s head after their loss to Aston Villa but Marsch described it as “the most complete performance” of his tenure.
Following their 2-1 defeat at Aston Villa on Friday night, the gap in perception between the Leeds manager and the Leeds fans could not have been much wider. After the match, Jesse Marsch described his team’s performance as the “most complete performance” of his tenure, their “best away performance” and “the best example of the way I believe the team can play”.
Travelling Leeds supporters who’d just been shouting “Marsch out” and who booed him when he went over to them after the final whistle disagreed with this assessment.
There is an element of something approaching the truth about Marsch’s comments. This being their “most complete performance” was certainly debatable because Leeds were ultimately beaten at Villa Park, but that isn’t to say that Aston Villa weren’t a little fortunate to come out of the match with all three points. Leeds had good opportunities that they were unable to take; they had a goal disallowed for offside and had calls for a penalty-kick waved away. Teams have played worse this season in the Premier League and won.
But Marsch was rather missing the point with his post-match comments. Citing “the best example of the way I believe the team can play” doesn’t count for much if you end up on the losing side. And even less so when the Villa game was Leeds’ seventh consecutive game without a win in all competitions, a run that has taken in elimination from the EFL Cup and coming extremely close to the same in the FA Cup, with only a stoppage-time equaliser preventing defeat to Championship strugglers Cardiff City.
The tightness of the bottom half of this season’s Premier League table means that no-one below about 12th or 13th place is anything like safe. Leeds are in 14th place after losing to Villa, which would be considered a substantial improvement on last season were it not for the fact that they’re only two points off the bottom of the table, and while other clubs around them seem similarly unhappy, the time for performances being valuable as indicators for the future has now passed. Leeds United need wins in the here and now, and Marsch must surely recognise that.
Of course, to a point he’s on a hiding to nothing. Given the bond between his predecessor and the club’s supporters, Marsch was always going to have a tough job on his hands simply for not being Marcelo Bielsa. Equally, Marsch has not always been the easiest manager to warm towards and if his comments on Friday night were anything to go by, he really needs to start learning to read the room better.
Because Leeds conceded two soft goals at Villa Park, and this isn’t the first time this season that their defence has looked creaky. And while they did create chances, especially throughout the second half, the fact that they weren’t taken does not reflect as well on Marsch as the manager seems to think it might. Creating opportunities to score isn’t worth much if those opportunities aren’t turned into very real and tangible goals.
Leeds haven’t been catastrophic in front of goal this season – they’ve only scored three fewer goals than Manchester United – but they have to take their chances at these critical moments. Especially when the defence is so porous.
And while a certain amount of leeway should be allowed for the fact that they’ve had to play consecutive games against Spurs, Manchester City and Newcastle during their recent winless run, a failure to beat Championship opposition in the FA Cup and a West Ham team that has otherwise seemed to be in meltdown in recent weeks – that draw was West Ham’s only point from their last seven Premier League matches – tells an obvious story.
Leeds are continuing to misfire. The margins are thin. Everybody knows that. But the defence remains rather flakey and the attack just a little blunt, and when the margins are thin, those small differences can come to matter very much indeed.
It’s not all bad news for Leeds, either. Tyler Adams has been an excellent signing, and looks like very good business at £20m. Patrick Bamford scored his first goal in more than a year at Villa Park on Friday night, while teenager Wilfried Gnonto, who signed for the club from FC Zurich at the very end of the summer transfer window, scored his first goal for the club against West Ham and is starting to look like, as the young people say, a ‘baller’.
But the positives for Leeds United feel either intangible or for some unspecified point in the future, and the tarmac on that particular runway is starting to run out. It is highly desirable for a club to have a philosophy, a plan and a vision for its team, but there comes a point at which this has to translate into something tangible. All the “best example of the way I believe the team can plays” in the world aren’t worth a great deal if it all ends in the Championship because you’ve just got relegated and cost the club more than £100m in lost revenues.
It’s clear that Jesse Marsch was always likely to be on a bit of a hiding to nothing if he could not get Leeds winning regularly, and four wins from 18 Premier League matches this season isn’t regularly enough. The patience of Leeds supporters, which never seemed to be that high in the first place because of who he replaced at Elland Road, now seems to be rapidly wearing out, and while the owners of the club have been – if only by the standards of the way in which football club owners behave with regard to the hiring and firing of managers – somewhat patient with him, that patience will soon start to wear gossamer thin if results don’t start to improve.
Against such a background, the FA Cup replay against Cardiff City starts to look like something of a tinderbox. A win against struggling Championship opposition will be the least that Leeds fans are expecting. Defeat in front of a large and febrile crowd could result in more of what Jesse Marsch experienced at the end of the Aston Villa game.
Things certainly don’t look as bad at Elland Road as they have at Goodison Park of late, but hackles are rising amongst the Leeds fanbase again, and their complaints won’t be ignored forever.