It wasn’t just on the Elland Road turf where Leeds looked a cut above Nuno Espirito Santo’s West Ham United as the Premier League stragglers suffered an eighth defeat in ten matches this term.
While a rare Mateus Fernandes header briefly threatened a Hammers comeback that would never materialise, setting nerves jangling along the way, even a draw looked pretty unlikely as early as the third minute in West Yorkshire.
Brendan Aaronson fired Leeds into a blink-and-you-miss-it lead. A lead then doubled by Joe Rodon with a quarter of an hour gone.
That was the ninth set-piece goal conceded by West Ham United already this season. It is no wonder Rob Green is urging Nuno to follow Sam Allardyce’s lead and devote countless training ground hours to the dangers of corners and free-kicks.
Former England goalkeeper Green, who represented both clubs in his playing days, also could not help himself from glancing around a febrile Elland Road while wishing his old employers from East London had a home like this to call their own.
Rob Green suggests West Ham United should be jealous of Leeds’ Elland Road home
That the London Stadium is not exactly a popular destination for Hammers fanatics is hardly news. In fact, you’d have to have buried your head as deep as Nigel Pearson’s favourite ostrich if you hadn’t noticed just how deeply a disheartened fanbase pine for Upton Park.
Just this month, club insider Sean Whetstone revealed that West Ham are ‘extremely unlikely’ to ever own the stadium outright.
Green, speaking on the Sky Sports Premier League podcast, highlights the paint-stripped, rusted corners of Elland Road as the prime example of what an intimidating arena looks like.
With only two home wins since the start of 2025/26, in contrast, West Ham tend to welcome their opponents into the old Olympic Stadium with a cup of tea and all the biscuits they can eat. Giving up goals aplenty and haemorrhaging defeats, it is less a bear pit and more a B’n’B for weary travellers to refresh and relax.
“The London Stadium is a nice place to play,” says Green, who remembers Upton Park in its pre-Sullivan and Gold heyday. “And it’s the worst thing you can say when you go there and you’re an away player.
“It’s lovely because the fans are miles away. There isn’t the atmosphere. You know, you play at Elland Road, they’re on your toes. They tell you what you’re saying.”
Your correspondent could see the whites of Nuno Espirito Santo’s eyes, only five rows from the dugout, as the rain bounced off his permanently-shaking head on Friday evening.
“When [the Leeds fans] are going to let [the players] know, they’re going to make themselves clear and be heard,” adds Green. “It doesn’t happen at the London Stadium.”
West Ham’s home un-comforts is in stark contrast, meanwhile, to the impressive start Everton have made in their tailor-built Hill Dickinson Stadium.
“It’s incredible. Our stadium has been built for us, as such,” Toffees defender James Tarkowski said on the Peter Crouch podcast.
“Obviously, [West Ham’s] was the Olympic Stadium.”
Green says Nuno Espirito Santo must follow Sam Allardyce’s lead
Green, who spent the 2016/17 season at Elland Road, believes Nuno’s team will continue to give their opponents a leg-up if they do not fix the set-piece issues which have plagued their campaign thus far.
“There is one thing they can go and do,” he says. “Go and stand on the training pitch and do it over and over again.
“You do that every day until you are sick to the teeth of it, and you are so bored that you think, when it comes to a game, ‘the one thing we are not doing is conceding from a corner, because I don’t want to go out next week and do day after day after day of set-pieces’.
“That is the only thing they can do.
“We did it under Sam Allardyce. He said, ‘you’re not very good at this. We are repeating, repeating, repeating set-pieces’. And it worked. You do it ad nauseam, and then you go out and you repeat on the pitch.
“Until they repeat it on the pitch, they are not giving themselves a chance.”
