Leeds United 1-1 Southampton: Intramural

Leeds manager Jesse Marsch was getting wound up by the end of this game, berating his own bench for substituting the wrong player, berating the referee over a foul and getting a yellow card. The situations would have enraged anybody. Subs are simple and important. The ref, Anthony Taylor, was so inconsistent I swear at one point I saw him with a full head of hair.

At the final whistle Marsch uncoiled, the stress leaving his body in a rush. He embraced his Southampton counterpart, Ralph Hasenhüttl, with warm smiles and laughter, coming back to him a few minutes later for more joviality before they walked down the tunnel. Leeds fans, not getting any explosive last minute winners this time, were choosing their emotions between underwhelmed by the football, disappointed to only draw and relieved to gain a point, but Jesse seemed just glad to share the points and a handshake with Ralph. “Nice to see him,” Marsch said, “and also his video analyst Kitzy is someone who was in Salzburg, and that I met years ago.”

They’re not strictly friends, but corporate colleagues. The Salzburg connection is, of course, Red Bull. Hasenhüttl played for Austria Salzburg in the nineties, the club that was later obliterated to form Red Bull Salzburg, and he managed RB Leipzig from 2016 to 2018; Marsch has coached at both, and the New York franchise. That’s how Marsch met Hasenhüttl, spending some weeks observing his work and learning not so much his ways as Red Bull’s ways, as dictated by Old Trafford’s incumbent Ralf Rangnick. Think of it like an intensive intra-organisation residential training course, with social breakout opportunities including dinner at Ralph’s house, where he performed his party trick of playing Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence on piano.

“Ralph is an incredible human being, that’s the first thing that needs to be said,” Marsch said in the build up to the game, but I think any RB coach will say that about any other RB coach. And there are a lot of them around now. Which is sort of the point, from a taurine sales point of view. There are competitive limits on how many clubs Red Bull can own — the whole RasenBallsport Leipzig sham will be hard to repeat — but no limits on the coaches and players they can train and send out into the world, to other clubs, where their RB credentials will be talked up within the hearing of the energy drinks market. You could never have two Red Bull clubs playing each other in the Premier League. But with Leeds and Southampton you can have two teams wearing their RB credentials in plain view, while outside Elland Road’s Kop gates free but forlorn bottles of Boost are offered to fans rushing into the game.

The course of the match was dictated by this set up, Arr Bee versus Arr Bee. Two narrow teams, Southampton with full-backs well suited to exploiting Leeds’ lack of width, Leeds with hard-pressing forwards well suited to winning the ball high, but not to finishing chances. It was like watching one of those experiments where two machine learning bots have a conversation and over time it decays into an uncanny facsimile of language, or football. In midfield, James Ward-Prowse kept snuffing out Leeds’ moves as if he knew exactly what they were, because he did. “I think [Leeds] are very similar to us,” he said afterwards, and Hasenhüttl had rustled Southampton’s usual approach to make themselves into a version of the team they would least like to face. “It’s about not giving them the opportunities that we like as a team when we’re against the ball,” said Ward-Prowse, echoing Marsch’s regular ‘against the ball’ usage. Soon everyone will be saying it.

United’s midfield prospered, though, for having Adam Forshaw and Rodrigo in it. Forshaw was a superb second player in every press, following in on his forwards’ harassing and winning the ball with big blocks and tackles, following right through the way Marsch instructs. Rodrigo, playing behind Dan James, dropped deep into those ball-winning areas and seized possession to fire passes for James or Raphinha to chase. If James could finish, he’d probably be one of the most dangerous forwards in the world. He can’t, though, not at the moment anyway.

Instead Jackie Harrison opened the scoring midway through the first half, a goal as scrappy as the tackle and tackle-back football on display. Liam Cooper, back from injury, took a chance of fouling on half-way and ended up on the floor, starting the move with a header in the grass. The ball was worked, crucially and rarely, wide to Raphinha and Mateusz Klich, and Raphinha forced and deflected his way to the byline inside the penalty area, clipping the ball across with a sliver of white line left. Goalie Fraser Forster got a touch on the cross, but Harrison reacted, sort of prodding a bouncer over the line. It wasn’t pretty but it did the job.

It was an important goal at the right time because Leeds, so active in the first half hour, lost their way and let Southampton’s idea of playing like their own worst enemies prosper. Leeds withstood long throws and corners, and after Che Adams pulled off every surprise he could think of on a twist in the penalty area — delaying, turning, shooting off the outside of his boot — Illan Meslier got his left hand down to the ground for one of his regular breathtaking saves.

The hope of a half-time reset lasted four minutes. Southampton used the interval to decide Kyle Walker-Peters should attack Luke Ayling more, and his free run from left-back won a free-kick just outside the penalty area. James Ward-Prowse scores those, so he did, inch perfect into the near top corner. Southampton do well for ten scruffs and a dead ball machine.

United could never quite find their early mojo again. Southampton, drifting in mid-table, had looked passive in the first half; their fans have been fearing a repeat of the beach football that took over when they were safe last season. The players got bothered enough not to lose then settled for making the game difficult for Leeds to win. Joe Gelhardt came on for the last half an hour, Marsch’s one attacking gambit, soon joined by Kalvin Phillips for a comeback designed to put more oomph into midfield. But with both teams focused on disruption — high pressing around the penalty area, straight balls into the same place — neither had much thought for construction.

Leeds got used to the initiative in the previous three seasons, building attacks down one wing, turning back when blocked and switching to the other, over and over until the pressure made the other team fall down. Losing that has been part of the struggle this season, as the initiative was wrested away from them and the attacking fell apart. They kept trying those things, though, inspired by at least the memory of it working well, and Marcelo Bielsa’s adamant insistence that it would work again. That belief does not yet seem to have transferred to Marsch’s methods, their long passive phases undermining the good spells we’ve seen of clear RB-ball activity. Before the game, Hasenhüttl had said pretty much this about Marsch’s progress. “The first fruits are good, and it’s on us to show the weaknesses they still have, because you can see that not everything is perfect with what they are doing — there are still things to learn, which is normal.”

With Burnley and Watford’s defeats helping this point be useful, Leeds are inching towards that future when the squad has been strengthened and players have learned everything and the team are as adroit in these methods as, well, Southampton. All our feelings, then, are pending, not such a bad thing given the excess of emotions before the international break. But it’s a weird flashforward to what an RB influenced future might be like: two destructive teams not geared for quality, an indifferent match, a draw, collegiate handshakes then we all go home. ⬢