People can’t seem to make their minds up on Leeds United this season.
At least that seems to be the view of Marcelo Bielsa when giving his assessment of the team so far this campaign. Leeds have been incredibly inconsistent at stages this season, whether it be their results over the Christmas period, or Patrick Bamford going ten games without a goal between the end of August and the start of November.
And speaking in his press conference ahead of the game with Queens Park Rangers, Leeds boss Marcelo Bielsa pointed out that with that inconsistent form comes a lot of contrasting emotions and opinion from those outside the club:
“After Arsenal, Leeds was a Premier League team, after the Wednesday match we won one of the last six matches. After we had the best defence, it now looks like we’re weak in defence. Bamford is a great goalscorer when he scored 10 times, he doesn’t score we doubt him.”
Whilst it’s fair to say that you can’t completely control the opinions of those outside the club, you can go a long way to helping it by bringing in some consistency.
That’s why the opinions are fluctuating so much, because Leeds haven’t been able to keep up their levels of production for long enough, that’s why there seeds of doubt being planted in people’s minds.
It’s the constant peaks and troughs that the team has been going through that make people wonder what sort of run of form the club will go through next. Will it be another ten game unbeaten run like they were on heading into Christmas? Or the run they’re on now with only one win in six league games?
And whilst it’s OK to have the odd blip here and there like losing one game in a course of 6, it’s when that one win becomes two and three that the optics start to look bad.
Does Bamford get too much blame for our lack of goals?
Yes
No
Even if it has to be a case of grinding out results like earlier in the campaign (something that is usually associated with team eyeing for a title) rather than taking risks and trying to completely overrun teams, at least then you’ll get consistent 1-0 or 2-0 results and all those doubts will slowly start to fade away.