Bamford completes comeback win as Leeds close gap on leaders Leicester
Not so long ago Leeds were a receding speck in Leicester’s rear-view mirror but suddenly Daniel Farke’s second-placed team are tailgating the Championship leaders.
A once seemingly unassailable gap at the top of the second tier has now been cut to six points. That is far too close for comfort for Enzo Maresca and his players who will doubtless have headed back down the M1 cursing their inability to see out a game they led for a long period and dominated until the latter stages.
Leicester arrived looking, for once, distinctly mortal. The leaders had travelled north without three key injured players in strikers Jamie Vardy and Kelechi Iheanacho and the midfielder Wilfred Ndidi. Last Saturday Enzo Maresca’s side had lost at home to Middlesbrough and, here, Leeds kicked off buoyed by a confidence bolstering run of eight consecutive League wins.
Yet as the thermometer dipped towards freezing point on a cold, clear West Yorkshire night, Farke’s players looked to be feeling the heat generated by rising expectations.
Granted they should probably have taken an early lead when Joël Piroe lifted a shot wastefully over the bar after connecting with Wilfried Gnonto’s sublime back heel, but Leeds struggled to cope with the speed and sharpness of their guests’ passing.
If Piroe will not care to view those replays which showed the unmarked, and ideally placed, Crysencio Summerville, screaming for him to deliver a pass that never came before that miscue, his teammates are unlikely to want to watch reruns of their high press being systematically stymied by Leicester’s slightly more considered contain and counterattack approach.
Archie Gray had begun as an inverted right-back but soon found his defensive workload dominated by the need to thwart Stephy Mavididi’s advances. One such visiting foray precipitated Illan Meslier tipping Patson Daka’s effort over the bar. From the resulting corner, delivered superbly by the influential Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and flicked on by Daka, Wout Faes headed Leicester into the lead.
Leeds were up against it but, refusing to surrender, forced a ferocious tempo as the game turned thrillingly open. But for some wayward finishing, Gnonto could have been celebrating a hat-trick by half-time.
One one occasion the Italy forward destroyed what promised to be a magical moment by shifting the ball inexplicably onto his left foot when a quick swipe of the right boot would surely have beaten Mads Hermansen.
Although it took a fine block on Jannik Vestergaard’s part to deny Summerville a near certain goal and the impressive Georginio Rutter repeatedly destabilised Leicester’s defence, Maresca’s players never looked unnerved.
Indeed whenever they counterattacked and, particularly when Dewsbury-Hall drifted away from opponents, home fans had reason to be fearful.
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Leicester’s quick feet and even faster brains continued to pose Leeds plenty of second-half questions they struggled to answer, with Ricardo Pereira increasingly conjuring inviting attacking space.
As Farke’s team lost all semblance of balance and control, Meslier saved brilliantly from Mavididi. A second visiting goal seemed to beckon when Vestergaard headed a corner against the bar and Daka steered the rebound into the back of the net but the striker saw his celebrations curtailed by an offside ruling.
Leeds needed to recalibrate the power balance and, endeavouring to tip things their way, Farke introduced Patrick Bamford and Dan James in place of Piroe and Gnonto. Replays suggested the hosts had been a little fortunate to make those substitutions while only one goal down as it appeared Daka had not been offside after all.
No matter, shortly after Leicester’s Zambian striker had missed an absolute sitter after cleverly cued up by Pereira, another Leeds substitute, Connor Roberts, appreciably enhanced his side’s hopes of automatic promotion by equalising.
On for the increasingly vulnerable looking Junior Firpo, Roberts advanced from left-back to find himself in the right place at the right time to shoot low and crisply beyond Hermansen after Rutter had beaten three markers. It was Roberts’s first goal for Leeds. Not to be outdone Gray promptly scored his maiden goal for the club too.
Watched by his beaming uncle, Eddie Gray, the 17-year-old duly evaded Leicester’s keeper courtesy of a fine left-footed drive that took a heavy deflection off Faes before turning Elland Road ecstatic. When Bamford made it three thanks to a stoppage-time free-kick, Maresca’s misery was complete.