Leeds United boss Jesse Marsch on what Aston Villa ‘like to do’ and how his team failed to stop it

Jesse Marsch’s first game in charge at Elland Road resulted in far from the dream debut for the American.

Aston Villa rolled into the raucous atmosphere, put their finger to the mouth of the Leeds faithful inside and got the job done in a professional yet exquisite manner.

Philippe Coutinho found the net yet again before Matty Cash added his second in three games and Calum Chambers stole some of Coutinho’s Brazilian flare, finessing one into the top corner to make it 3-0 and in doing so caused loud boo’s to echo around all four sides of the stadium.

For as good as Villa were on the night, Leeds were incredibly poor and Marsch was the first to admit that in his post-match press conference.

The former RB Leipzig boss claims from the minute Coutinho opened the scoring from a situation they had discussed at length prior to the game, it was all downhill from there.

“The goal they scored we talked specifically about the fact they like to do cut-back crosses and we didn’t adjust to it at all,” Marsch explained.

“It was a little unlucky to deflect off of Pascal [Struijk].

“There were a lot of elements in the match that we had spoken how we wanted to handle our set-pieces, our movements and ideas with the ball and our movements and ideas against the ball.

“We didn’t execute and we didn’t follow the plan.

“At half-time I addressed this, I addressed the confidence, I addressed making sure that we were more fearless in our approach.

“I reinforced the tactical messages that we had before the game and then we had a good phase.

“We had a good phase at the beginning of the second-half where we played the way we wanted to play and we brought the crowd into the match which is always the goal.

“We weren’t sharp enough or good enough to find the equaliser in that moment and we invited a few too many counters and gave up the second goal.

“After the second goal for me we became a bunch of individuals and tried too many individual moments and not enough team coordinated ideas of how to get ourselves back in the match.”

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