My Leeds United plea, main positive and how Whites can improve sleepy defending - Tony Dorigo

This season has been very 'Leeds United' so far in that nothing's really clear and it's up and down. I'm struggling to work it out, writes TONY DORIGO.
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I basically feel that we haven't quite got what we deserved with our position in the league as it stands. I think we're a better team than what our league position says. However, we also do things to really harm ourselves which has got to stop and it's not so much about the attacking end as we seem to be able to score goals now.

Crysencio Summerville has come to the fore, Willy Gnonto has come in and Rodrigo is in good form. We have still got Luis Sinisterra to come back and Patrick Bamford is still there. We certainly look like we can score goals and that's always a positive so far.

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But we really have shot ourselves in the foot so many times this season, not just in the last few games but this season as a whole so far and that's what's really hampered us. That's a strange thing because we are doing some of the difficult things well but then slipping up on some of the easy, straightforward stuff.

PRAISE: In difficult circumstances for Leeds United's Pascal Struijk, right, pictured challenging the tricky Dejan Kulusevski during Saturday's 'crazy' 4-3 defeat at Tottenham Hotspur. Photo by Paul Harding/Getty Images.PRAISE: In difficult circumstances for Leeds United's Pascal Struijk, right, pictured challenging the tricky Dejan Kulusevski during Saturday's 'crazy' 4-3 defeat at Tottenham Hotspur. Photo by Paul Harding/Getty Images.
PRAISE: In difficult circumstances for Leeds United's Pascal Struijk, right, pictured challenging the tricky Dejan Kulusevski during Saturday's 'crazy' 4-3 defeat at Tottenham Hotspur. Photo by Paul Harding/Getty Images.

Clearly, defensively we are struggling at times and it's not always just down to structure and tactics. Certainly, that was a problem for us in the first half of Saturday's game at Tottenham with Pascal Struijk on that left hand side. The space afforded to Tottenham there was far too much and that's fine when we have control of the game. But we never really can properly control a game.

Once Jesse Marsch wanted Crysencio Summerville to stay further up the pitch then someone had to get across because clearly Dejan Kulusevski is a very, very clever player who drifts inside. Pascal is then left with a couple of players with Emerson Royal running at him as well. It was difficult and tactically that was an issue which kind of got addressed at half-time.

But a lot of the time, it's not so much tactically, it's just falling asleep. It's just making individual errors and it's very hard for Jesse to work out how to try and improve that apart from just the mentality of each individual person because there has been some poor stuff.

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There was the header from Liam Cooper for one of the goals and then we fell asleep from a throw-in for another one. These are just pretty simple things that are costing us. With those sorts of mistakes, you can look at the confidence of the team. Once you start getting one or two clean sheets and doing well then a lot of that type of stuff can change.

Clearly, Pascal is still playing at left back and I think he has done great for a left-sided centre half. He's come on leaps and bounds and he's trying to go forward more and he's doing that pretty well. Will he ever be the same as a specialist left back? No. But he's doing a great job and you can see him playing along that backline for many a year. But I think we all agree that he is a left-sided centre half who is doing a wonderful job. There's certainly little things that we can change there but it's frustrating because we have seen each player play very, very well at times this season but then it just seems to come unstuck for one or two.

I get so entertained watching Leeds these days. And I don't want to be. I don't want to be the first on Match Of The Day again and can we stop that because it's crazy. The way we kept responding at Tottenham was wonderful and the goal that Harry Kane scored was just crazy. I can't believe that was given.

From every single that we saw when I was commentating it's clear that Clement Lenglet just jumps into Illan Meslier and is pushing him backwards. How that was given I don't know. Yet the boys still come back and they come back again and again but unfortunately I just felt in the last 15-20 minutes that there was a kind of inevitability about things.

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That's what we have got to get rid of and what the players certainly have got to get rid of. They have to learn how to control games and how to see things out and be a bit cute here, there and everywhere. I'm not sure we have got that yet so clearly that's something that all the players have to do. But a lot of the players are new to the Premier League and there's some young boys in there as well so hopefully that will come quickly in the second half of the season.

The focus now falls on the World Cup with Rasmus Kristensen away with Denmark plus Brenden Aaronson and Tyler Adams with the USA who obviously face England next Friday night. You could argue that we could end up hating them if they beat England but I'm never going to hate them! Granted, for 90 minutes I might not like them very much!

But watching the World Cup is going to be wonderful. It's strange because at Spurs the World Cup was furthest from my mind. It was hard to work out that it was going to be the next thing. Now I have got Sunday circled, Qatar v Ecuador, the big one. I'll get into the World Cup and I'm really looking forward to it.