Leeds United couldn’t come away from their trip to Manchester City with a point, but was it ever reasonable to have any expectation that they could?
If nothing else this week, Sam Allardyce has already proved one thing since his arrival at Leeds United. He is exceptionally good at making it all about him. It’s difficult to imagine another managerial appointment at a club fighting against relegation from the Premier League that would dominate media headlines in the way that this one has, and this can only be partly pinned on the fact that it’s happening so late in the season.
When Allardyce sits in front of a press conference and says that he’s as good as Pep or Klopp to the world’s media, he’s either completely completely self-aware or completely oblivious. There can be no middle ground, and this is the point at which we start to wonder whether he’s playing 4D chess with us all. Perhaps the very first thought of his was: “This team has been playing as though the weight of the world has been on their shoulders, as though you can visibly see the pressure bearing down upon them. Perhaps I could release that valve a little by saying the Big Sammest thing I can think of saying and acting as a sponge for that attention”. Or perhaps he just thought, “Yeah, I’m as good as these two fancy dans” and took an enormous bite out of a gala pie.
His first big decision was to brush the cobwebs off Joel Robles and install him in goal in place of Illan Meslier. In a sense, this was understandable. Robles may have not played many more than 100 games over the last decade, but there can be little question that Meslier’s recent form has been poor and that confidence is all-important in this particular position. It was a sound, logical choice, and after a quarter of an hour he seemed to have justified Allardyce’s decision by blocking a shot from Erling Haaland.
For Manchester City, the potential distractions are growing on a daily basis. The Premier League title race, for all that you may read otherwise in some corners of the press, isn’t quite decided yet. They need to keep winning. Against West Ham they’d looked a little out of sorts for spells, though this hadn’t prevented them from gliding to a comfortable 3-0 win. And next week they travel to Madrid for the first leg of their Champions league semi-final, a match will go a far longer way towards defining their season in the long run than this one.
They made seven changes to the previous…
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