Overnight fixes do not exist in football, but Jesse Marsch’s evolution of Leeds United’s style is slowly, but surely, weaving its way through Thorp Arch after a whirlwind few weeks. Andrew Taylor leads the under-23s into their biggest game since the American took over tonight and he is finally seeing that brand of football rub off on the development side.
The former Middlesbrough full-back was in the eye of the storm when Marsch arrived as he was thrust from his all the more sedate loans manager role into frontline coaching. Mark Jackson was taken from the under-23s and brought into the first-team staff, so Leeds needed a safe pair of hands to take care of the younger group.
Taylor, assisted by Michal Pujdak and Alessandro Barcherini, has had to quickly assimilate Marsch’s ideas and see them implemented with the club's next generation, some of whom are required to play for the first team right now, let alone the future.
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“It was a whirlwind for the first week or two or three, where we're all trying to adapt to a new game model,” he said. “We, as coaches, are trying to understand fully Jesse’s game model so then we can implement that to our lads.
“It's still a long process, still a transition. We're not going to do it overnight. It takes a bit of time, but we are learning and things have calmed down a little bit now and we're starting to see things we're asking of the lads being implemented in games as well.”
Taylor will be stood on the touchline at Elland Road on Friday night with title-chasing Manchester City in town for a Premier League 2 tie the hosts badly need points from. Leeds have a four-point buffer to the drop zone, but Chelsea have a game in hand.
With more than 18,000 hopeful supporters watching on, it promises to be the ideal game to sum up that balance in academy football of development and performance versus cold, hard results. Asked about that balance, Taylor said: “When you're a youth team player, and I'm talking younger, probably is performance development and yes the under-23s is a development team in a development league and the whole idea is to get from there into the first team.
“However, part of that process, for me, at under-23s is trying to prepare the lads on how to win games of football and the importance of winning a game of football. This one on Friday night, you probably don't get any closer to a Premier League game than you will.
“Twenty thousand people at home at Elland Road against a really, really strong Manchester City team who are going for their title, they want to win the league. We need to win to stay in the league so there's that added pressure of needing to win the game as well. So it all adds up to hopefully a really good night.”
