The Season so far

Great Support 

We are now almost one week into the season and what a week it has been , I was one of the very unfortunate Leeds fans in attendance at St Mary's last Saturday evening to witness a appalling display of overall football from every one in a Leeds United shirt apart from Adam Clayton , Clayton himself wasn't outstanding but he appered to be the only player in blue trying to get anything going for the away team along side him in central midfield were Captain Jonny Howson and new signing Michael Brown , I'll get to Howson in a moment but lets look at Brown for a second he was bought into the team to be the enforcer of our otherwise lightweight midfield he promptly was book after little more than 10 mins after a few nasty late tackles and at one point even trying to take out the ref with a tackle from behind , for his own sake he was sacrificed not long into the second half otherwise he would already be looking at a suspension . As for Howson he was hardly invovled in the game which seemed to mostly pass him by one problem we have seen a few times from Howson over the last few years is his lack of ability to stamp any authority on the game.

On the wings we had Max Gradel and Robert Snodgrass, who both have been transfer targets from other clubs this past off season both looked well off the pace from the start with Snodgrass almost seeming not to care some even saying his head may have been turned by the interest from his Premier League suitors , Gradel was later to score from the penalty spot for a very undeserved consolation goal for United.

Now on to the back 4 who between them looked like they had never seen a football before with Andy O'Brien being the main culprit of inept defending  he was repeatedly turned inside and out by the Saints strikers and failing to close down the ball for Saints 1st goal ever since we signed him on a long term contract he has looked like bambi on ice when forwards run at him. Patrick Kisnorbo we can give a little slack to he has been out with a very serious injury for the past 18 months so he is still getting back up to hopefully the level he was at before that night against Millwall where he suffered the horrendous injury in the first place but after Saturdays match it seems he's still along way from his previous level. Darren O'Dea only joined Leeds on a season long loan from Celtic the day before the game so we can let him off for now as he is still learning to play along side his new team mates .

In goal we have new recruit from Preston Andy Lonergan who signed after a protracted contract negotiation and so far he must be wondering why he left Preston having to play behind that back 4 , as someone mentioned on Twitter after the game on Saturday its no wonder we signed two GK's who can both be number 1 the mental damage of playing in goal for Leeds is more than one man can take for a whole season , Lonergan for me though has so far been fairly impressive he had no chance with any of the goals against Saints after being wildly exposed by the defence , he did pull off one great save towards the end of the game pushing a ferocious shot on to the post  to keep the score from getting even more embarrassing .

*** EDIT*** 

This piece was written just before the Middlesbrough game , when the team performed very admirably in the face of a awful ref who does seem to have a vendetta against us , we did very well to only lose 0-1 after losing Gradel and Howson to terrible decisions but they served there suspensions during our mid week game vs Hull in which we got our first 3 points of the season thanks to a fantastic 4-1 win thanks to goals from McCormack , Lees , Snoddy and Nunez only a own goal from Lees somewhat spoiled the game but he more than made up for it with a grat strike at the other end , Lees now has the same amount of goals for us as our FORWARD Billy Paynter , he looks a great prospect at the back and seems to have been a constant threat from corners and free kicks already . 


We head to West Ham this Sunday lunch time with both teams coming of the back of big wins in midweek  , this    is going to be our biggest test of the season so far with WHU being many peoples pick for the title this year , knowing Leeds this is the kind of game we will get a result from we normally play very well against the bigger teams in the division take the QPR results last year for the proof of that so here's hoping we can get some sort of positive result 


MOT 


I'm @RossBell1984 on twitter follow me there