Five defeats in six and the anxiety is beginning to show for Leeds United. For the second game in a row they took an early lead through Lukas Nmecha but ended up with nothing, Morgan Rogers producing a pair of remarkable finishes to lift Aston Villa into the Champions League qualification slots. Leeds remain in the relegation zone.
“Performance-wise we’ve turned back to what we want to be,” said Daniel Farke. “We should’ve taken some points from this game. We are not back to our best. We can still improve, but at the end we are just disappointed we did not get any points.” Given the way Leeds faded in the second half and their lack of guile throughout, that was perhaps an overly sanguine reading.
Villa began the season apparently still feeling the hangover from missing out on Champions League football. But they have won nine of their last 11 in all competitions, the depth of their squad beginning to tell. Donyell Malen began on the bench and, while he may not have scored in his third successive game, his arrival at half-time shifted the momentum as Villa became only the second away side in 26 to win in the league at Elland Road. “We started poorly but we’ve found a bit of rhythm and stuck together as a group,” said Matty Cash.
“You have to be resilient in places like this. In the second half we played really well.”
Last season, the Southampton manager Ivan Juric observed that he had expected his side to be technically and tactically inferior to other Premier League opponents but had been surprised by how physically inferior they had been. The Premier League is a step up from the Championship in every way.
The promoted sides seem to have absorbed that lesson. One of the reasons that, as a trio, they have started the season relatively encouragingly is that they have all reinforced with physically imposing players. For three-quarters of the first half at Elland Road, Villa struggled to live with Leeds’s aggression. Had Leeds’s ferocity been allied to slightly more finesse or guile, they could have in effect had the game won before Villa at last began to settle in the final minutes before the break.
As it was, their main threat was set plays, particularly those delivered by the right boot of Sean Longstaff. It was his free-kick that brought the opener after eight minutes. The goal was ugly, and Villa protested, but Emi Martínez was far too easily distracted as Nmecha challenged him, allowing Anton Stach to divert the ball goalwards with his back. Ezri Konsa’s hack off the line then hit Nmecha and rebounded over the line. Martínez may have been at fault for the opener, but he did get down sharply to keep out a Brendan Aaronson snapshot after a corner had been half cleared. He made another fine save late on to keep out a Pascal Struijk header for another free-kick.
The problem is sustaining that level of intensity. Leeds visibly tired towards the end of the first half and struggled to pick it up in the second, when Nmecha was left far more isolated than he had been in the first, the midfield no longer able to get forward to support him. That in turn allowed Villa more of the ball and, under less pressure, they began to use it rather better, in part because of the introduction of the Dutch duo of Malen and Ian Maatsen for the second half.
after newsletter promotion
Within two minutes of the restart, the change had paid off, Malen finding space in the right side of the penalty area, taking a cutback from Lucas Digne and drilling over a low cross that Rogers converted with a deft flick. His second, 15 minutes from time, was even better, a strange dipping free-kick from the edge of the box whose startlingly sharp parabola confounded Lucas Perri as it got up and down over the wall. Rogers ran straight to the set-piece coach Austin MacPhee to celebrate Villa’s second goal from a direct free-kick in successive games after Emi Buendía’s against Bournemouth. “It wasn’t bad,” Rogers said. “Emi’s been practising, I’ve tried to practise with him. I’m not as good as him. We’ve been practising that technique. I’m happy it worked out today.”
Leeds seemed to have equalised almost immediately, only for replays to show that Dan James’s cross-shot had been diverted in by the left hand of Dominic Calvert-Lewin. They applied pressure after that, but that incapacity to create chances from open play cost them. With Manchester City and Chelsea next up, the anxiety is only likely to get worse.
