Fingers have been pointed at Diego Llorente and Leeds United’s defence after Saturday’s 5-2 hiding at Brentford, but Jesse Marsch feels that flak needs a different target. On a day which revolved around referee Robert Jones, VAR and Marsch’s touchline behaviour, it was hard to ignore the defensive horror show in Hounslow.
Even if the award of a penalty was wrong and Ivan Toney’s free-kick was virtually unstoppable, goals three, four and five, which carried the game away from Leeds, were error-riddled. Llorente and Robin Koch conspired to miss a simple through-ball, before the former failed to track Bryan Mbeumo’s run and then attempted a drag-back as United’s last man with Yoane Wissa on top of him.
Marsch himself made the point Leeds went from conceding five goals in as many games to doubling their goals against in the space of 90 minutes. In a shambolic display which diverted eyes to the waiting captain on the bench, Marsch was asked what he would now do with Llorente and Koch.
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“We’re never going to point fingers and if anyone wants to point fingers then it should be at the manager,” he said. “I have to put the players in [a] position to succeed.
“We've been doing a really good job. We've had a lot of decent games and some really good performances and picked up some points early in the year.
“We know we're going to have a lot more to do. Teams are also understanding what we're trying to achieve and we're going to have to be able to adjust in matches.”
One of the more worrying tenets of the summer pre-season programme was the ease with which opponents could cut Leeds apart on the counter-attack. With eight team-mates committed high up the field to counter-press, centre-backs were repeatedly left exposed on the break.
That had, thankfully, not been as cruelly exposed in the opening five matches as it was by the Bees at Gtech Community Stadium. Marsch said: “Sometimes we put our centre backs in difficult situations because when we like to counter-press, and be very aggressive with certain things forward, we need to put out some fires, but we're tactically sound.
“We've done a good job of that. Again, before even 1-0, we were fine in the match and then, even at the beginning of the second half, we create some big chances and maybe we could make it 2-2 and then obviously the game gets crazy.”
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