ClaphamFox

"Inside the stadium bowl". WTF?!

Also massive pressure on Southampton though - tomorrow is definitely last chance saloon territory for them with regards to automatic promotion. They will need to go all-out for the win irrespective of how Leeds do tonight.

Rob Tanner wrote an article about him in the Athletic yesterday. There's an interesting comment below from a Leeds fan who lives in Nottingham and claims to have met Choudhury a few years ago... C Conor M. · Yesterday @Logan K. as a Leeds fan studying in Nottingham, me and my friends ran into Hamza by chance at Powerleague in Nottingham in the summer of 2021. We were a man down and he stepped in, just for the love of the game, one of the nicest, most genuine blokes I’ve ever met. Whilst all you said might be true, I felt compelled to say that at least when I met him he was a fantastic bloke 👍

It will come down to mental strength as well as physical freshness. Leeds fans don't seem convinced their players have the bottle for it, just as we weren't convinced about our players after Millwall and Plymouth. In the end, our players did show a lot of bottle on Saturday, which ultimately got us over the line in a game we probably should have lost. Can the Leeds players do the same in a high pressure game? I have my doubts, but we'll find out later...

Daka DOES play with energy though, doesn't he? Often it's literally all he offers and personally I don't think that's enough to justify his place in the team, but you can't deny that he presses better than any other attacker we've got...

For people who already have a card, being forced to fork out £25 to obtain a completely unnecessary replacement is shameful. It's just an attempt to bully people into switching to digital. I'm not surprised that the club didn't even bother attempting to justify it in their statement because they know it's completely unjustifiable.

Rumour or guess?

Our home league form since Christmas actually hasn’t been terrible - five wins, two losses and a draw. It’s our away form that has cost us (we’ve lost five out of nine league games away in 2024). Of those two home losses, we were awful against QPR but created more than enough chances to beat Middlesbrough. We also should have won the drawn game against Ipswich. So there’s only been one truly bad performance at home in the league during our poor run. We usually get the job done at the KP and I think we will today.

That's some emotional rollercoaster you're riding...

Yes. But to be be more specific, I think what's happened is that is that teams that seek primarily to nullify us (rather than impose their own game on us) have sussed out how to do so. They've studied the way we play and figured out how to set themselves up to make it harder for us to score. Our poorest performances since Christmas have all come in these types of games - the losses against QPR at home, and Millwall and Plymouth away, being the prime examples. When teams attack us, we tend to perform much better. We might not always win these games - see Leeds away - but we invariably create enough chances to win when other teams have a go at us. The other problem is that while this has been happening, our efficiency in front of goal has collapsed - some of the chances we've missed have defied belief. Even in games where we've really struggled, we've still usually created enough chances to get something - but our early-season goalscoring form has deserted us. If we'd have put away just a few of the sitters that Daka and Vardy have missed, we'd probably be promoted already. Your point about Enzo's stubbornness is correct, though. I don't think there's anything wrong with having his preferred formation and style as our baseline approach, but his refusal to change things when it's not working is his glaring weakness as a manager. It may well be down to inexperience - he has the blinkered arrogance of an idealistic teenager who believes in something so strongly he just can't accept that sometimes other ideas are also valid. If he has ambitions to be a top manager, he'll need to significantly improve his in-game management. Hopefully this season has taught him a thing or two. If we go up, which I believe we will, next season will be a different kind of challenge. Very few teams will park the bus against us, even at the KP. They'll all fancy their chances against us. This will give us more space to attack but will give us a much bigger challenge defensively. We'll likely need to play on the counter-attack a lot more. Let's hope Enzo is flexible enough to understand this - because if he tries to steer us through a PL season (with a points deduction!) with the same rigid idealism as he has shown this season, he'll be gone by Christmas.

Given our difficulties in breaking teams down that sit deep and try to nullify us, our pursuit of Sensi in January makes sense - we were clearly in need of a ball-playing midfielder who can break through the lines, which is apparently Sensi's profile.

I heard a rumour that it’s Thomas Bramall.

We won’t have a transfer ban if we get promoted. Even if we don’t get promoted, we’ll probably avoid one provided we sell KDH before 30 June - and I suspect plans have been put in place for that eventually. If we go up, our length of stay will probably depend on the severity of the points deduction. But I don’t agree it’s a foregone conclusion that we’ll be relegated straight away.

I suspect the perception that we are in a ‘mess’ is far higher among our own fans than it is to outsiders. If we get promoted we’ll be an attractive proposition, with or without a looming points deduction.

Is that a typo or have you had a disturbing vision of the near future...?

I agree entirely. It's just a matter of whether Maresca is willing to sacrifice a bit of pace in order to get somebody in who might actually defend better.

This is why Faes always gets picked irrespective of his form. The inverted full-back system leaves us open to being counter-attacked down that side (which both Millwall and Plymouth exploited to full effect). Although Faes is not especially quick, he's quicker than Vestergaard and Doyle, so can - theoretically at least - cover for Ricardo when he goes bombing forward. The fact that Faes is not performing this function very well at all has cost us points recently, but I suspect Maresca's terror of playing Vestergaard and Coady together means that Faes will probably keep his place.

Agreed.

If we get promoted and Maresca stays, Sensi will join us in the summer.

Doyle struggles against pacey wingers - so much so that he was taken off at half-time against Birmingham because he couldn't handle Miyoshi. West Brom have a pacey right winger in Tom Fellows. So while Doyle would offer a bit more in attack through his passing, he might leave us very exposed to counter-attacks on that flank.

He’s not going to start two strikers. It’s pointless wishing for it because it’s just not going to happen. He will drop Daka and probably replace him with Vardy. Cannon might see some minutes from the bench. I’d very much like him to drop Faes but I’m sceptical he’ll do it as he seems to have a mortal terror of pairing Vestergaard and Coady. Maybe he’ll spring a surprise here, but I’m not confident of it. And we’ll win, by the way.

Kieran Maguire reckons £25-30m for the period ending June 2023. But it seems Stefan Borson thinks it’s worse than that.

Did Borson explicitly say that he thinks the EFL/PL could agree new rules and impose them retroactively on us? If so, I’d love to know his reasoning. I’d imagine that we’d launch a robust legal challenge against that if they attempted it. It’s interesting that he thinks our breach is worse than those of Forest and Everton. Kieran Maguire reckons ours is slightly lower than Forest’s. I guess we won’t find out until the panel delivers its verdict. Dis Borson predict eight points or is that your guess?

Yes - with the panel. Our process hasn’t started yet, which means we still have the opportunity to be open and honest with the panel that reviews our case.

What ‘lack of candour’? We haven’t even begun to deal with the independent panel yet. The likely sanction will be a 4-6 point penalty next season. This will make life harder for us, sure, but it won’t necessarily define our future for an extended period.