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Braved a little look at stats from yesterday and a couple of things stood out. First, look how many take ons Manchester United attempted yesterday: over double what Leeds attempted.
The first manager we heard really talk about using players that can dribble past their man as a way to cut through Leeds was Steve Cooper when Swansea pulled off a smash and grab at Elland Road. The thing is though, it didn’t really contribute to Swansea beating Leeds.
The same is not true from yesterday’s game. Manchester United have elite players in one v one duels and they utilised this with great effect. Whilst Swansea created nothing in open play, Manchester United created at will.
The second thing I noticed is quite an obvious one if you watched the game but seeing it presented like this it was stark. If you look at these two images here: Leeds had a very similar amount of final third activity to their opponents.
However, Man Utd’s dashboard features a lot of successful actions in the penalty box, where’s Leeds’ dashboard is a sea of red in that area. This is really to be expected, given the difference in quality of players.
As we know now, Leeds will go again in the next few games and come out and attack Burnley and WBA in the same way that they did yesterday. The hope there is that without the quality difference on show yesterday, Leeds’ style will be the telling factor in these huge games.
