Leeds United need more quality and attacking intent to survive Premier League drop | OneFootball

This season is not shaping up like the past two years in the Premier League, where the three newly-promoted sides have looked woefully inadequate and all ended up a long way adrift of safety. The league table tells us there have been worse sides than Leeds and especially Sunderland this season.

But even with Wolves currently look nailed on for the drop and Burnley struggling again, Leeds United still have plenty of hard work to do to if they want to stay in the top flight, especially since West Ham and Nottingham Forest are both improving under new management.

At the very least, Leeds need either to get results against the teams around them in that bottom half, or to make Elland Road as formidable a place to go as possible. Preferably both, obviously, but one or the other might just be enough – and their survival hopes currently looking much more likely to hinge on whether or not they can continue to make their home their fortress.

So far, they’ve done…OK, but will rightly feel they could be doing better. Leeds have claimed wins over Everton, West Ham, and respectable draws with Bournemouth and Newcastle. Before Aston Villa, the only team to take three points away from West Yorkshire had been Tottenham.

The frustration is that if things continue in their current vein, they are going to NEED every point they can get on their own turf. Leeds’ win away to Wolves represent the only points they have taken on their travels this season, despite four of those six games coming against the current bottom six.

As such, there is a quite legitimate irritation that they could have had an even better return if they just had a bit more creativity and – as this game particularly highlighted – a bit more willingness to go for the jugular when the opportunity to do so is there. Their inability or unwillingness to do that against Tottenham and Bournemouth had already proven costly, and now they can add Aston Villa to that list.

Sure, by his own admission, Daniel Farke has bet Leeds’ survival farm on making themselves as hard to beat as possible – but potentially to a fault.

Coming into this game, only Wolves (4) had scored fewer goals from open play this season than Leeds (5). The same is true of total goals. That’s no accident: Leeds’ expected goals from open play of around six goals from 11 games ahead of this game ranked among the weakest returns in the Premier League.

The bigger part of the issue this season is not that Leeds haven’t been having plenty of efforts on goal from open play, because they have; coming into this game, they ranked 10th in the league for open play shots per game.

But the chances they have made outside set pieces have, on the whole, not been great, at just 0.068 xG per open play shot – the fifth worst in the division. For context, eight Premier League sides average at least 0.1 xG per shot, while the league leaders in that regard, Crystal Palace, are nearly twice as effective at 0.121 xG per shot. (Villa, incidentally, started the day absolutely bottom of the pile.)

Even with their home advantage well-established, Leeds struggled to improve on that record here. Their eighth-minute opening goal came thanks to a bit of luck from a set piece – Lucas Nmecha didn’t even shoot, but rather watched a goal-line clearance ricochet off his shin and into the net.

With Villa looking completely toothless for the rest of the half, the time was right to go and kill the game off. Instead, Farke’s side had just one shot on goal from open play in the whole of the first half.

Leeds started paying the price for that within three minutes of the restart as the newly-introduced Donyell Malan burst to the byline and put a ball in towards the near post that Morgan Rogers turned home for 1-1. The England international’s sumptuous free kick 15 minutes from time then gave Villa the lead to finally wake Leeds up and remind them there was in fact a set of goalposts at the other end.

But the only time Leeds really looked like rescuing a point, in among a load of speculative long shots, was when Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s swift ‘equaliser’ was correctly ruled out by VAR for the clearest handball you ever did see. Even when they actually make those chances, it seems Leeds just can’t help themselves.

If it is indeed a matter of a lack of intent in Farke’s instructions, that is irritating, but it can also be fixed. The alternative explanation is that Leeds simply aren’t very good in the final third – and now they have slipped into the bottom three, that would be far more troubling for them.