All lovers of football should be delighted by Sam Allardyce’s sudden re-emergence as a key character in what was looking like a predictable ending to another season of the Premier League. It’s hard to imagine many people were enthused by the prospect of watching Leeds lose heavily at Manchester City on Saturday – until Sam set aside his podcast headphones and sat down for his first press conference as Leeds manager.
“I might be 68 and old, but there’s nobody ahead of me in football terms,” he said. “Not Pep, not Klopp, not Arteta ... In terms of knowledge and depth of knowledge, I’m up there with them. I’m not saying I’m better than them, but certainly as good as they are.”
Saturday’s showdown was now the object of feverish anticipation as the braggadocious podcaster went head to head with Pep Guardiola.
Guardiola knew what Leeds’s approach was going to be. As Allardyce said on a recent podcast, “I have certain ways of working and the one way of working which everybody sees as a negative, which is actually the best positive of all: stop goals going in ... You go in and set the structure. The structure is not to get beat.” The not-getting-beat structure involved Leeds keeping as many men behind the ball as possible and hoping to block and clear their way to a result.
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Guardiola also knew how his team were going to solve the problem. The plan: if they drop deep and leave no space behind the defence, then we’ll use the space they leave in front of the defence.
After 12 minutes, Riyad Mahrez found himself in a crossing position on the right, but rather than aim for one of the team-mates attacking the six-yard box, he pulled a low pass back to Kevin De Bruyne, who shot from the edge of the box.
On 16 minutes Mahrez did it again, this time feeding Ilkay Gundogan in the D. Confronted by a mass of Leeds defenders, Gundogan passed it back out to the right wing and De Bruyne, who immediately pulled another low ball back to Alvarez on the edge of the Leeds box.
On 19 minutes, Mahrez again came in from the right and rolled the ball to the edge of the box, into the space that had opened up in front of the retreating Leeds lines. Gundogan’s shot fizzed in at the near post. There were nine Leeds players in the box, but the City midfielder was unmarked.
On the touchline Allardyce conferred urgently with his assistant, Karl Robinson. Were they planning some measure to stop the bleeding? If so, the effects were not immediately apparent. On 23 minutes Mahrez came in from the right and – you guessed it – pulled a ball back to the edge of the box. That one was cleared by Weston McKennie, but four minutes later Mahrez again got free on the right and pulled it back to Gundogan unmarked in the D. This time the low shot found the other corner.
City were showing Leeds: “Park the bus if you like. We’ll round you up like sheep and score from the space you leave in front.”
Allardyce consciously presents himself as the opposite to all the many frauds and posers who try to dress football up as something more complicated than it is. “In the media world, around this country of ours, this ‘style of play’ rubbish – it’s doing my head in,” he grumbled on a recent podcast. But that is what all this talk of styles of play is really about: the ongoing effort to find answers to the new questions being asked by teams such as Guardiola’s. The pitches are perfect year-round, the players run twice as far as before, the goalkeepers are playing out from the back – in all these ways the game really has changed. When Allardyce learned to play and to coach his way, no team had either the ability or the patience to pass the ball 900 times in search of the right kind of opportunity. Playing the way Leeds did against City is like trying to lasso a flying saucer.
Yet Allardyce is also right that, in some ways, the game is the same as it ever was. So much is decided by how you react to an unexpected shock, and fear can still suddenly jam the gears of any team.
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After City scored their second, the match settled into a holding pattern – City saving energy for bigger tests to come, Leeds playing dead and hoping to avoid further damage to their goal difference. The stand-off lasted until the last ten minutes, when City won a penalty, which Erling Haaland surprisingly handed to Gundogan so that he could complete his hat trick. It was a nice personal touch from Haaland, showing that his pursuit of records is not yet an all-consuming obsession. But Gundogan missed, Leeds promptly scored from the next play after a mistake by Manuel Akanji, and City were suddenly faced with the appalling prospect of a late equaliser in a game they had dominated to an almost absurd degree. They needed Haaland’s elite time-wasting-in-the-corner skills, previously showcased against Newcastle, to take them home.
Afterwards Gundogan reflected: “The sad thing now is, looking back, the disappointment of failing to score the penalty is a bit higher than actually scoring two goals and winning the game.” In addition to scoring twice, he had completed 170 passes – breaking a Premier League record previously held by himself. That he could feel disappointed after such a performance tells you something about City’s high standards – but it also tells you something about football.
Guardiola’s former assistant Juanma Lillo has spent his career in coaching preaching that we should praise what is done well, not just what ends well – but he’s fighting a losing battle against human nature. How you feel at the end of the game is usually how you feel about the game, and this is not what City wanted to be feeling as they prepare for the defining moment of their season against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu tomorrow night. If Madrid do derail the no-brakes City treble train, you hope Allardyce doesn’t forget to claim his little share of the credit.
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