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Match report: Leeds United get the show on the road
Without prompting last week, assistant boss Steve Staunton defined October as a bad month for Leeds United.
* Click here to enjoy a picture slideshow of match action from the game.
Bradley Johnson pledged to return stronger: Click here for full interview.
Martin Allen never lacks an opinion and Cheltenham Town's manager might find something to say about that.
How did Leeds United's players perform at Whaddon Road?
Click here for Phil Hay's verdict.</
Crises come in different shapes and sizes and Allen would be hard pressed to draw any comparisons between the situation in Leeds and his personal circumstances at Whaddon Road.
United were guilty of losing their footing last month, often without explanation; Cheltenham's predicament is a far deeper kind of trouble.
That much was made clear by Leeds' 1-0 victory at Cheltenham on Saturday, the result responsible for cracking the mystery of United's sudden vulnerability away from home.
Defeats in all of their previous four away matches – three of those league fixtures – moved Staunton to confess that the cost of October had been high, but as United's assistant boss admitted himself, some bad months are worse than others. November looks better already.
A slender defeat of Cheltenham at a stadium where Leeds had not won before Saturday carried Gary McAllister's team into second position in their division, as close to the top of League One as they have been since they defeated Scunthorpe United on the first day of the season.
It is not the position where meandering clubs tend to find themselves or expect to be.
Allen would readily trade Cheltenham's position for McAllister's and it is he who has most to fret about with a third of the season gone.
Four away defeats were undeniably worrying for McAllister, but the dissatisfied chatter that sequence created was more to do with the standards automatically imposed on Leeds than it was to do with any real sense of panic.
As he discovered long ago, expectation comes with the territory of the manager's office at Elland Road.
To that end, United's commendable, though slightly nervous, defeat of Cheltenham will not silence every moan in the city, but it was a crucial result at the end of an extremely demanding fortnight.
The pessimistic assessment of Saturday's result would be to view it in the context of Allen's hellish injury list and the general lack of confidence in his squad, but it is fair to reflect on the committed manner in which Leeds bullied Cheltenham before the break and fought off their desperate advances after it.
For several players in McAllister's team, the game at Whaddon Road was their fifth appearance in 14 days and the second of two long trips in the space of a tiring week.
United lost their grip of Saturday's match in the second half, to such an extent that at one point Cheltenham striker Paul Connor ought to have equalised, but their fitness held impressively and the crucial fact at the end of the second period was that the hosts ran out of time before Leeds ran out of steam.
United did not wish to contemplate the prospect of a fifth away defeat, or even a fifth away fixture without a victory and it was obvious from the attitude of their players that they understood the one matter of most relevance at Whaddon Road.
Saturday's match was one United were required to win; the details of their performance were something for McAllister to assess later.
Cheltenham were not quite the toothless entity that reports suggested they might be, but Allen's weak and ever-changing squad was always working against him.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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