Dan needs time and faith to build a team
LEEDS United are top of the Championship. They have won 21 games out of 37 this season and scored 56 goals and only conceded 30.
Town are 18th in the Championship. They have won 11 games this season and scored 45 goals, conceding 58.
In short, Leeds United are a better side than Town so there is no need to panic over Saturday’s defeat.
Boss Danny Cowley was quick to praise Leeds for a reason. It hurts, that’s how local rivalries work, but it’s the truth.
Cowley’s reverence for the ‘genius’ Marcelo Bielsa was obvious and Leeds are, unfortunately, the real deal. At the point of Bielsa’s
appointment in the summer of 2018 Town were preparing for their second season in the Premier League. In his first 31 games in charge of Leeds he took them to 58 points, including 17 wins.
This was Danny Cowley’s 31st game in charge and he has earned 41 points in that time with 11 wins.
Now while there’s a stark difference there, let’s look at the context.
Bielsa’s Leeds had a full preseason under their new manager, signed four players on permanent deals and four more on loan that summer and started with a squad that had finished a comfortable 13th the previous Championship season anyway.
Bielsa’s career to that point had taken place largely in football’s top tiers, plus 13 years as an international manager with Argentina and Chile. In 2001 he won best international manager in the world. In 2009 he won South American Coach of the Year.
Cowley came into a team who had one point from their first six games, a squad in decline with several players we’ve subsequently learned didn’t want to be there and the transfer window over three-and-a-half months away.
His rise had been meteoric and going straight through 11 tiers of English football to get your first job at a Championship club is extremely impressive – but not quite at the level of managing at World Cups and Copa Americas.
He steadied the team, got them winning, struggled through the injuries and then squad expulsions, improved the side in January
and has done as well as anyone could have realistically hoped for.
Two managers, very different circumstances that cast a very different light on their respective first six months in the Championship. Town are on the up and Cowley is the right man to keep that upward trajectory going, but he’s not a miracle worker.
Town are making progress but it’s slow – as Cowley always warned us it would be – and the summer can’t come soon enough.
A defeat to local rivals always hurts.
Leeds are an excellent side on the up nearly two years into a storied manager’s reign. It pains us all to realise it but the reality is Leeds are everything Town want to be. They just need the time and faith in the manager to get there.