Tony Pulis does not really do small talk and his address to the players on joining Middlesbrough cut, typically, to the chase. “I’m not here to mess around,” he said. “I’m here to win promotion.” That was late last December and a near-miss in the play-offs and an assiduous pre-season later Pulis seems very much on a mission to stick to that pledge.
Well before the end of a warm Yorkshire night featuring more bookings (eight) than shots on target, when pressing eclipsed final-ball precision, an unusually agitated Marcelo Bielsa knew he had a serious managerial rival at the summit of the Championship.
Despite having their style cramped by Adam Clayton’s destructive excellence at the heart of the visiting midfield, Bielsa’s Leeds remain ahead of Boro on goal difference at the top of the table, with both teams four points clear of the chasing pack. It remains very early days but, on this grittily convincing evidence, this still unbeaten pair should surely remain in strong contention all season.
“It’s a fair result,” said Bielsa. “It was a very hard game. We can be satisfied. What we did was pretty good against a very difficult, very physical, side.” Pulis seemed happier. “We were defensively very good and edged it but we’re better in possession than we showed,” said a manager delighted to have kept his Denmark forward Martin Braithwaite despite interest from a club in Spain before Friday’s closure of the loan window. “It was a very good, very British game.”
It was also a multi-tiered collision. There was the clash between the division’s meanest defence (Middlesbrough) and the its most prolific attack (Leeds), the philosophical conflict between Pulis’s pragmatism and Bielsa’s idealism, and the intriguing midfield contest involving Samuel Sáiz and Clayton.
With the gifted Sáiz Leeds’ creative catalyst, much hinged on Clayton’s interpretation of the enforcer role in Pulis’s 5-4-1 formation. Although Sáiz had his moments Boro stayed strong throughout with Clayton arguably man of the match.
Indeed the visitors began so powerfully that Bielsa soon rose from the bucket on which he habitually perches on the edge of his technical area. As the normally calm former Argentina coach windmilled his arms in the manner of a policeman directing traffic, his players remembered their press-and-pass creed and the game’s already high intensity heightened.
Boro were menacing from Mo Besic’s dead balls, and Jonny Howson forced Bailey Peacock-Farrell into a decent save. At the other end Clayton cleared Luke Ayling’s header off the line.
After that Bielsa temporarily retreated to his bucket, which he says gives him perfect sight-lines of the pitch, however his view continued to be marred by the sight of Pulis’s players not only winning a series of dangerous set pieces – including quite a few long throws from Ryan Shotton – but also performing some highly efficient pressing of their own.
Apart from being somewhat less dead-ball dependent than Friday’s guests, Leeds prefer to move the ball swiftly along the ground but Middlesbrough succeeded in making this more of an aerial contest than Bielsa and his charges would have liked.
When the mood takes them Pulis’s team can play a bit, too, and with Liam Cooper sometimes unsteady in the home defence, odd flashes of subtle quality from Stewart Downing sporadically raised the tone during a feisty second half punctuated by bookings.
He and Sáiz occasionally had everyone on the edge of their seats but, as Bielsa noted afterwards, this was a night when “creative actions” were invariably “neutralised”.
