Our head coach wants Leeds to start showing a mean streak, but is that all we need to do to turn our season round?
With league football taking a back seat for two weeks, we’ve all got plenty of time on our hands to reflect on the disappointing season we’ve had so far. It’s all very frustrating considering that Massimo Cellino has done what most fans had been calling on him to do, to stay in the background and give the manager a chance to manage.
With our new-found stability our expectations were pretty high at the start of the season, so where has it gone wrong? Away from home we can be pretty satisfied with our results, getting two wins and being very close to a third at Bristol City. And even at Middlesbrough we can be satisfied with our general play during much of the game, in a very difficult fixture against one of the favourites for promotion.
But it is of course our home games where things have not to plan, and it’s all coming to a head after the lifeless performances in the games against Brentford, Ipswich and Birmingham. Rosler has said that we don’t need to panic, but today he admitted that we need to be a bit more like good old fashioned dirty Leeds, with more of the high tempo football we used to produce in front of our home crowd.
He told the official site "We can be better and we’re trying our hardest, that I can assure you. We have to realise that we have to show quality. But it’s not only about playing nice football. We need to be ruthless, have a nasty streak at times. We need more aggression and we all have to realise that.”
But are Rosler’s tactics at least partly to blame for the fact we find ourselves down in 16th place in the table? Whilst his 4-3-3 formation works well away from home, where we can contain the opposition with the extra man in midfield and then hit them on the break, at home it’s not working, when the onus is on us to try to break through the opposition’s defence.
Wood has been ineffective as a lone striker, and there isn’t much point in putting high crosses towards him when he hardly ever wins the ball in the air. He’s scored some good goals, but all of them have been with his feet, and when he does get a chance with his head he tends to put it well wide or over the bar.
So I’d definitely play Antenucci alongside him in a 4-4-2, at least in our home games, especially as the Italian has had an excellent season so far. And elsewhere I’d give Botaka a start, as he’s shown a bit of quality in the glimpses we’ve seen so far, while at the back I’d stick with Cooper and Bamba as a settled central defensive paring (though Rolser might already have decided on that himself after Bellusci’s horror show at Boro).
Whatever changes he makes it’s certainly not going to get any easier for Rosler, with the next home game after the international break pitting Leeds against Brighton, who are currently the surprise leaders of the table and unbeaten so far this season. It may be a tough ask to get our first home win in that game, but the head coach will need a bit of success soon, before you know who runs out of patience.