Leeds 2-2 West Ham: Three Things We Learned

Leeds United and West Ham United played out a thrilling 2-2 draw as the Premier League relegation battle heats up.

While the war for the title and the top four is always going to be intriguing to watch, the big drama always tends to stem from the push to beat the drop. There are often so many teams involved right up until the final day and last night, we saw a handful of important results come through en route to that destination.

One, in particular, that caught our eye was at Elland Road. Leeds and West Ham went to war in a game that saw four goals, with both sides sharing the points.

Today, we’re going to run through a few big takeaways we had once the full time whistle had blown.

Yorkshire heart

While there have been problems with Jesse Marsch since he arrived, and how he’s setting up his starting XI on a week to week basis, Leeds are still a fascinating team. After going 1-0 up, they found themselves 2-1 down in the early stages of the second half here. Then, through guts and resilience alone, they clawed their way back into proceedings and set themselves up for an important run of games. Oh, and Marsch was once again on fine form on the touchline by sarcastically clapping the officials.

Hammers troubles

It’s now evident that West Ham are in real trouble, as if it wasn’t before. David Moyes has done a lot of great things for this club, most notably in European competition. Alas, that isn’t exactly going to be fresh in the memory of the fanbase. Instead, they’ll be thinking about how they are lingering around the bottom three – and based on how they threw this lead away, we can’t imagine they’ll be confident in getting out of this situation anytime soon.

Relegation fever

We’ve already touched on just how fun the relegation battle can be. Of course, that won’t be true for the clubs currently in the mix, of which there are many. By our calculations, the following teams are going to be scrapping it out between now and May: Crystal Palace, Leicester, Leeds, Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, West Ham, Everton, Wolves, Southampton. In addition to that, we could see a few sides in the top half (or Villa) slip down – making this one of the most electric relegation scraps we’ve seen since the start of the Premier League.