Anything Leeds United do now will be too late but the wacky thing is it might not matter. Leeds were a little less feeble against Fulham than against Crystal Palace and Liverpool, still lost, and still stayed out of the Premier League relegation places. Javi Gracia doesn’t have to fix everything and shouldn’t be expected to. He might not be able to fix anything, and shouldn’t be expected to. He just has to get this team to the finishing line above the relegation line. It looks impossible from here, with six games left and no hope of a win, but remember last season’s last six: a draw, three defeats, a draw, then a win at Brentford. It was ludicrous but somehow it was enough.

At the end of it all, up or down, Gracia should hand the club back to the people who made this mess, or the people spending hundreds of millions to take over this mess, and go get a normal job at a sensible club. What will be will be at Leeds and I don’t see why Javi, gracious enough to come here and do his best, should spend a minute more worrying about it than he has to. He’s carrying a haunted expression now, rubbing his face on the sidelines, telling the press that he is “worried about everything”. He’s been trying to restore some sanity to Leeds, to control the chaos, make them harder to beat. But good sense has been absent from Leeds so long the club now acts as if it never knew it, doesn’t want it, wouldn’t know what to do with it if it came. Last season Jesse Marsch attacked the threat of relegation with Joe Gelhardt upfront, Sam Greenwood in midfield, Raphinha at wing-back taking long throws. Perhaps instead of trying to calm things down, Gracia needs to romp through the next six games doing the maddest things he can think of. Mateo Joseph, Archie Gray and Wilf Gnonto in defence?

At Craven Cottage Leeds were basically the same again as their recent games with mild tweaks that didn’t help much. Liam Cooper and Max Wöber returned to the defence and did enough good stuff to suggest dogged commitment might be the way forward. Their brave tackling and last-ditch blocks stopped Fulham in situations Palace and Liverpool danced through. One delirious tackle by Cooper, just inside the penalty area, was risky but carried out as soundly as could be, his tackling leg low, all his aim on the ball. Wöber, from left-back, hunted confrontation. It meant Leeds, by half-time, were still in a dour match.

In the second half Leeds were undone from further forward. Rodrigo was leading the line, with Jackie Harrison and a lively looking Crysencio Summerville either side and Brenden Aaronson behind. The bench promised Pat Bamford, Georginio Rutter, Wilf Gnonto and Luis Sinisterra to reinforce them. But there was no point and nothing they could do up there if not given the ball. In midfield, Weston McKennie achieved twelve of his twenty attempted passes, four of the completed ones nominally going forward. Marc Roca was a little more successful, accurate with 34 of 43 tries, a bunch of them reaching the wings, but that ends up highlighting the paucity of McKennie’s contribution alongside him. You might think, well, perhaps McKennie was deployed more defensively. But if he was, where was he for Fulham’s goals? For the first, he was caught upfield as Fulham took advantage of the space in front of the defence to isolate its weak point, Rasmus Kristensen at right-back, and jogged back with no thought of picking up Harry Wilson, who was at the back post to finish when Illan Meslier flapped the cross to him. For the second, he failed to control a bouncing ball in Fulham’s half and they did the same again, through the space to the left-wing, through Meslier’s confidence to a goal.

Meslier is catching more flack than crosses lately, as shot after shot goes by him, but the level of work he’s having to do under stress is smothering his exceptional ability. Given too much to do, under too much pressure, he isn’t coping as the last line of defence for Andrea Radrizzani’s hundreds of millions of xTD, expected takeover dollars. If Radrizzani had only made as many mistakes as Meslier in the last two years, perhaps his investment wouldn’t be leaning so heavily on a 22-year-old goalkeeper to bail him out. One option would be to drop Meslier for his experienced back-up, Joel Robles. Another option would be to give him less to do, but this is the major fault in United’s current way of playing under Gracia. Every game just feels like a matter of time. The counter attacks through an absent midfield and an exposed, inadequate defence feel like a matter of when, not if. Cooper and Wöber’s intensity isn’t useful if it isn’t matched by the players in front of them. Marc Roca, hitting three consecutive corners into the front post, is not on his best game. McKennie? I’d wonder what question he came from Juventus to answer, only I remember it very well.

McKennie came when Leeds needed reinforcements to ward off relegation but, without Tyler Adams to cover the ground alongside him, he’s made Leeds worse. He does not look a good use of whatever the loan fee was, let alone the £35m bill to keep him. Likewise, when Leeds needed someone more potent in attack, they got Georginio Rutter, a record signing who only seems to be getting on the bench now because there are nine seats to fill.

Max Wöber, at least, looks like he has played for Leeds since 1989. But Rutter looks like a figment of my imagination, so I don’t know what Leeds must look like to him. And McKennie looks like he hasn’t even got here yet. Leeds were answering the wrong question with these players, as they have been since before Marcelo Bielsa was sacked. Instead of identifying players fitted to the urgency of the situation who would improve Leeds United right now, Victor Orta was bringing in players who might have made Jesse Marsch look like a good coach in four years’ time, if he was still here, if Rutter or Brenden Aaronson had blossomed, if Adams and McKennie won the next World Cup for the USA. Like last winter, when Bielsa was offered reinforcements that were entirely unsuited to his team, as if it was Leeds’ first window with him and his methods rather than the eighth, January’s manager is gone and January’s work looks idiotic now someone else is in the dugout, trying to fit sprocket A into flange B without losing their damn mind.

Hindsight is 20/20 but hindsight was here in January. It took one week after the transfer window closed for Leeds to decide this season under Marsch wasn’t just going wrong, but had gone wrong. For the second season in a row, they leapt into action after the best chance of fixing things had been wasted. One difference is that last season’s stupidity didn’t commit the owners to a £70m outlay. And last season’s hopes of rescue included Kalvin Phillips, Raphinha, Mateusz Klich, Joffy Gelhardt, Diego Llorente. San Francisco 49ers CEO Jed York was at Craven Cottage on Saturday, perhaps having awkward conversations with Shahid Khan, owner of Fulham and the Jacksonville Jaguars, shrugging his shoulders and trying to explain that he’d thought these guys knew what they were doing.

That’s what they’ve liked telling everyone. From Angus Kinnear selling last season as ‘accelerating the coaching transition’ from Marcelo Bielsa to Jesse Marsch, to Andrea Radrizzani declaring that the ‘great job in the market’ last summer was making a second relegation battle ‘impossible’, to Victor Orta telling El Pais the best business he did last year was ‘to replace Kalvin Phillips with Marc Roca’, the bravado has not been lacking.

Until now. United didn’t even bother putting the highlights or interviews from the Liverpool game on the club’s official YouTube channel, and whether that’s due to someone with the password going on holiday or a wish to pretend it never even happened, ten days of silence say something about a club in retreat. It must be nice to have the option. Illan Meslier can’t hide, out on the pitch in front of thousands of people having every gap in his youthful technique exposed to the world, caught between options like being booed or dropped, or maybe even sold. Javi Gracia has to front up to press conferences before and after every match, our manager of two months trying to account for the last two years. If he doesn’t find answers he’ll be sacked. And this describes the power that players who have a few bad weeks of form don’t have, that managers who can’t work miracles can’t wield, because they are only the employees of the people whose fault all this is. The people to blame can fire someone then hire someone else then move blithely on, in the background when they choose to be, or the foreground when they choose to be, until they sell and take the profit and leave. ⬢