Queens Park Rangers   2 (Saito 17, Cook 30) 

Leeds United                 2  (Fox 0g 40, Bogle 51)                     

 

15th ​March, 2025, EFL Championship.

17,457.

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That wasn’t what we needed to send us away for the two-week international break, was it? A sloppy, tired looking performance with one or two players seemingly already on their break!

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Daniel Farke was ready to take the blame for this one, claiming he thought long and hard whether to play Gruev and Willy Gnonto  rather than Rothwell and Aaronson. Aaronson has been poor for a few weeks now but Joe Rothwell seemed to have made himself indispensable after his stellar performance against Millwall. In the event, it was the hapless Brenden Aaronson who possibly cost us the game.

To be fair, Leeds' passing all through the game was poor, from Meslier booting the ball out of play on more than one occasion to simple passes being intercepted all over the pitch – Struijk, Rothwell and Bogle to name but three guilty of that crime. But it was Aaronson who inexplicably and lazily tried a suicidal blind pass in his own penalty area that put the ball into the path of Koki Saito in the 17th minute. To be fair again, it was then a magnificent curling shot from Saito to beat Meslier and bury itself in the far corner, but he should never have been the chance.

Memories of so many London trips came flooding back. So often we have travelled in hope to the capital on sunny days like this only to shoot ourselves in the foot in the opening minutes. It felt even more like that on the half hour.

I’ve said several times this season already how I think our defensive record – in terms of goals conceded- has actually masked the fact that, our defence isn’t very good. We usually give so little ball away to the opposition and spend so much of the game attacking that our back five usually has very little to do – it may even be why Illan Meslier gets caught out now and again – neither he nor the defence gets much practice at ‘defending’.  And so it was again today on the half-hour. A simple ball swung into the area from the right wing and Steve Cook, Captain Cook himself, one of the biggest blokes on the pitch, was in acres of space and was unchallenged  as he rose to place a straightforward header inside the far post. It was a piece of dire, tired looking defending, naïve even.

Somehow, Leeds pulled themselves together from that low point and, five minutes before the break, we grabbed a lifeline. Finally we put a string of neat passes together, Tanaka, Piroe and Solomon working together to feed Junior Firpo in the R’s penalty area. His shot was fortuitously deflected into his own net by Morgan Fox with Jayden Bogle even more fortuitously failing to touch it on the way in; he would’ve been offside. Finally Lady Luck turned up!

At halftime, Daniel Farke acknowledged he probably got his line starting XI wrong or maybe he just realised Aaronson was still berating himself for his earlier mistake and was having a nightmare game. Either way, Farke, unusually, hooked Aaronson off and sent on Willy Gnonto; the experiment many fans had been calling for in recent weeks as Aaronson’s form has dropped off.

The second half was only six minutes old when Willy made his first significant intervention, a slide rule pass through the inside right channel to Dan James. James pulled the ball back, Solomon shot and Paul Nardi saved, but Jayden Bogle was sharply in to prod the rebound inside the left post.

It could have been even better for Willy as he should probably have steered a Manor Solomon low cross beyond Nardi from close range but Willy got more air than ball and a big chance went begging. In fact, poor as Leeds were at times today, the football stats people still had us creating four big chances to just one for the R’s, and an xG of 1.46 compared to just .82 for the home side, the shame was though that we missed three of our big chances; the story of our season really. Good as we have been, but for better chance-taking, we’d have been out of sight by now…

Burnley did what they had to do at Swansea today and a quick look at the stats from that match suggest they were pretty comfortable;  we can but hope that the Owls can do us a favour against their Sheffield neighbours tomorrow and then we can ponder things for a couple of weeks before the final run-in; it looks like it might go all the way but, for it to do so, Leeds need to rekindle their mid-season flame or it might be those damned play-offs we’ll be dicking about with in May again.