The Verdict on a brilliant comeback win for Leeds United at Stamford Bridge.
Leeds United owe it to absolutely no one to make sense in a Premier League survival campaign.
Chelsea boss Liam Rosenior felt it was 'ridiculous' that his side could dominate all but a six-minute spell of the game at Stamford Bridge and still concede twice to draw 2-2. In a way he was right in saying that because creating 3.65 xG [Expected Goals] in itself suggests Chelsea should have won this game handily on home soil. They took 19 shots to Leeds' four. They accounted for more than twice the number of touches in the opposition penalty box than Leeds. Cole Palmer saw an empty net from a couple of yards out and missed. Most pertinently they went 2-0 up. That should have been that.
Making it make sense was difficult at full-time, when the home manager struggled to explain how he was not talking about a victory and Daniel Farke was putting it down to the intangible quality of mentality. Leeds, who created next to nothing in the first half, had two shots on target over the 96 minutes and both went into the net. But it doesn't have to make sense or even look good when your first and only priority is staying in the Premier League.
Leeds have made themselves almost impossible to predict in a Premier League campaign that continues to confound expectations. Chelsea club captain Reece James wrote in his programme notes of his expectation for the 'extra edge' that comes with this fixture. The Blues were expected to exact a measure of revenge for the bruising 3-1 smack in the nose they suffered at Elland Road. What was to be expected of Leeds was anyone's guess prior to the team being named, because 2025/26 Daniel Farke is not a man to be predicted. Even when the team sheet landed it was not immediately obvious what the German was going with in terms of a formation because he had six defenders on there, but that and the presence of two defensive midfielders revealed the visitors' approach. The big news pre-game was the absence of Dominic Calvert-Lewin, whose talismanic form has brought so much more than goals to the newly-promoted side's survival battle.
Illness robbed Farke of his main man and a player who at least gives Leeds a chance of spending time in the opposition half. In his stead came Lukas Nmecha, whose immediate sharpness in training upon return from injury was talked up by Farke in Monday's press conference. The size of Nmecha's task at Stamford Bridge was just one of numerous obvious sources of adversity to be overcome if the Whites were to take anything from the game. The rest almost all came at the other end of the pitch where Chelsea had plundered three goals in four of their last five outings. Joao Pedro had three goals and three assists in his last four games going into it. Palmer was coming off a hat-trick performance against Wolves.
The opening minutes said little about a gulf in class between the sides or the star quality of Liam Rosenior's attack. Leeds worked hard to get close to blue shirts, so close that they left something on one or two of them in challenges. That, their stubborn defensive shape and the officials combined to frustrate Chelsea, at least initially. Robert Jones dished out a pair of yellows for fouls on Gabriel Gudmundsson and Brenden Aaronson as Leeds tried to break on the left. But the visitors failed to make their set-pieces count.
And as Chelsea started to work Leeds out, they became more and more ominous. Palmer was central to it, finding space in areas in between the back line and the midfield. Before Leeds knew it, he was pulling strings and pulling defenders or Ilia Gruev all over the place. Before long it was 1-0 Chelsea. Palmer picked it up in space, spotted that Joao Pedro had got the run on Sebastiaan Bornauw and played him through to finish beyond Karl Darlow. Pascal Struijk's injury absence was showing itself in the discomfort of a back three thrown together in a never-before-seen iteration.
With the lead established Chelsea relaxed further and Palmer continued to enjoy far too much space. He was heavily involved again before Joao Pedro took the ball on his chest in the area and hooked it just wide of goal. The home side's time on the ball exposed the issues for Leeds, who looked light in the middle of the pitch and unsure of quite who was to deal with Palmer, or even how. Jayden Bogle looked lost in his advanced position and Aaronson wasn't in the game at all. Nmecha could not give Leeds a platform. Even long throws failed to bring even a glimmer of joy. And as the Blues won more than their fair share of duels they took the sting out of the Whites entirely. They even injected a little of their own, Estevao dumping Joe Rodon into the advertising boards and avoiding a yellow in the half's final action.
Farke decided to stick with it at the start of the second half, despite Leeds having created 0.01xG in the first half and Bornauw being on a yellow. But within 10 minutes of the restart the centre-back was coming off and Noah Okafor was coming on. Things got much worse before they could get better, however. A minute after his change, Chelsea went 2-0 up. A long ball in behind drew Jaka Bijol into a foot race with Joao Pedro, who was running away from goal, and the centre-back inexplicably put two hands in his back and shoved him to the floor. Palmer, inevitably, thumped the penalty home.
But if Chelsea felt the rest of the game was to be just as inevitable, they had forgotten who they were dealing with. This was still the Leeds who dominated them in a game earlier in the season, the same Leeds who came back from two goals down to draw with Liverpool. They don't do the expected and they do not read scripts. Almost out of nowhere, they found a way back into a game they hadn't ever really been in. A long ball out to James Justin allowed him to put on sufficient pressure to force a loose ball and Bogle carried it into the area, where Moises Caicedo fouled him. Nmecha thumped home the penalty, every bit as emphatically as Palmer had, and so began a different game.
Whether it was that little bit of uncertainty that Leeds had introduced or the sheer will of Bogle, everything then changed. He once again strode onto a ball just outside the box and then fought his way through a crowd like a man possessed. Through or around blue shirts he went, causing enough chaos that the ball found its way to Okafor for an empty-net tap in. As a sequence of events it was a total nonsense. In the eye of the beholding away end it was remarkably beautiful. A lengthy VAR check disagreed with Chelsea complaints of a handball or a foul or just anything to spare their blushes blowing a two-goal lead, and it was 2-2. Bizarrely, unexpectedly, and yet somehow deserved.
Only the away end could be heard for most of the game but especially by this stage, and in that din Okafor attacked again, racing to the box and looking to play it across to Nmecha only for the ball to hit the offside Gudmundsson. And with that, Chelsea woke up and remembered who they are and how this was supposed to go. How they make sense of football. Pedro Neto joined Palmer in creating and tormented Leeds down that side, curling in crosses that begged a touch.
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On and on came the pressure and yet the ball stayed out of the net. Joao Pedro headed onto the top of the crossbar and then with Leeds totally unlocked by a flick, the ball was played across the goal for an unmarked Palmer who contrived to miss from no real distance. It was as bad a miss as any seen in the Premier League over the years, a one in 1,000 occurrence according to Rosenior and a moment that allowed the away end to dream and the visitors to believe that maybe they were not to be denied a famous point.
Six minutes of time added on were played largely in and around the Leeds box, without a breakthrough and that was that. The blue body language was despairing. The men in white clung to one another in relief and joy. The away end erupted in tandem with the away technical area. Four points from the Club World Cup champions. Another point towards safety and the trading of places with Spurs, who lost to Newcastle United.
If 38 is to be the magic number this season then Leeds are just two wins and two draws away, with 12 games to go. How and when they get there does not need to make sense so long as they do.
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