The oldest prank in the book got a run-out on Sunday as fireworks went off around Sprowston Hall, the hotel used by Leeds United before the first leg of their play-off semi-final at Norwich City. One burst was heard around 1am and another closer to 4am, followed by the wait to see if money burned was money well spent.
Inside the manor, Leeds were only vaguely disturbed, but on the evidence of the month behind them, a loud bang to wake their squad up was not necessarily a bad thing. None of the Championship clubs involved in the play-offs travelled into them with the speed of a train, but Leeds more than any other were at risk of sleepwalking in a scenario where the sharpest of senses were called for. Daniel Farke kept calling them the best team below the top two, but from matchday 38 onwards, they looked less and less like it.
Farke can generally count on a warm welcome in Norwich, but not on weekends like this one and not at a point in the year when managers prefer to be on the beach, physically, metaphorically and spiritually. His two Championship titles at Norwich, in 2019 and 2021, were so comprehensive that the players he coached there were not even obliged to show any interest in the play-offs, but it was his old club against his current club in the semi-final yesterday, hence the welcoming party outside Leeds’ hotel. The play-offs have no room for sentiment and no sacred cows; slaughter or be slaughtered.
Rutter played No 9 in Bamford’s absence (Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
Nor, Farke said on Friday, were they the time for a coach to gamble by veering off a beaten tactical track, but either that comment was a strategic bluff or the temptation to wrong-foot Norwich gripped him at the last minute. When his line-up dropped at Carrow Road, it showed a sudden change of tack: Archie Gray fielded at 10 with Georginio Rutter ahead of him, rendering redundant the doubt about whether Joel Piroe could pull up his socks at No 9. What exactly it was designed to do in an attacking sense was moot, but it served its purpose in getting Leeds out of the first leg with a goalless draw, some calm restored and their promotion chance very much unscathed. “We wanted our defensive stability back,” Farke said and, in fairness, it was priority number one.
The risk of trying something new while the stakes were peaking spoke for itself. It could as easily represent a manager under pressure taking a punt as it could a stroke of genius and ultimately Farke’s strategy fell between those two stools. In his defence, it was not as if the logic of the tactical tweaks required much explaining. Latterly, Piroe up front had left Leeds with no dependable outlet, limiting their attacking possession and hindering their patterns of play. A knee injury deprived Farke of Patrick Bamford as an alternative. The midfield, meanwhile, had leaked water like the Titanic against Southampton eight days earlier, making the case for an extra body alongside Glen Kamara and Ilia Gruev. The line-up was based on rational thought. It was just not Leeds as Farke usually builds them.
Part of him must have wondered if, in the form Leeds had shown away at Queens Park Rangers and Southampton, the first leg at Norwich had the potential to decide everything; that if Leeds were as flaky as they had been on the Championship’s finishing straight, they could lose the tie there and then. What he got at Carrow Road, and what he might have settled for beforehand, was a textbook semi-final first leg in which neither team took undue risks, neither team was bold enough to play their highest cards, and neither team left with vast superiority after possessional control shifted from Norwich before half-time to Leeds after it.
“All cards are still on the table,” said Norwich manager David Wagner, and so they are. Convention says Farke has the advantage now, on the strength of parity after 90 minutes and a home leg to come, but it’s never appropriate to actually say that. “It’s 50-50 and both sides have the same chance,” Farke insisted. “I’m pleased with the performance. We can be pleased, but everything is still possible.”
How much Farke rues Leeds’ reluctance to kill themselves in search of a goal yesterday depends entirely on the second leg. The play-offs tend to work like that: the value of a team’s initial performance is dictated entirely by the outcome after their second. Gray shored up Farke’s midfield without unloading much attacking gunfire on Norwich, but Rutter, like Piroe, is searching for his own epiphany having returned from hernia surgery in March with his verve drained. He swung and missed at a good chance in the first half. Sam Byram swung and missed at an equally good one in the second. Junior Firpo gobbled up a Shane Duffy mistake but saw an offside flag go up as he rolled the ball into the net. Norwich’s Josh Sargent let a cross bounce off a shoulder eight yards out and Gabriel Sara made nothing of the ball popping up for him 14 yards out. Little forays aside, that was that.
Some of Farke’s enduring optimism is pinned to what he calls “spotlight games”, the dates that jump out in a division which is too long to avoid its share of hum-drum fixtures. His perception is that Leeds have the measure of them, a perception based on them taking 12 points from the two clubs who finished above them in the Championship table, Leicester City and Ipswich Town. Certain results have contradicted that, though, and none more so than the 4-0 defeat at QPR which made a reunion with Norwich unavoidable. Thursday, at Elland Road, promises more fireworks than Carrow Road got yesterday, more fireworks and then some. In his time as coach, Farke might never have experienced a spotlight quite so hot.
(Top photo: Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
