Leeds United 3-0 Plymouth Argyle: Sentimental education

Well done Leeds United for winning this game in such comfort. I don't always like my football efficient, but it didn't feel worth getting dragged into a tussle with Wayne Rooney's Plymouth Argyle, so three goals in eight first half minutes were a welcome way of drawing a line under thirty minutes of waiting and wondering.

Before the game Plymouth were talked up as the brave attacking losers of 21st place. They turned up at Elland Road in Stanley Tools' colours with a defence of six. This is supposed to be the way to stop Daniel Farke's team, and he pointed out that half Leeds' opponents this season have come at them with a bespoke plan. Or, in this case, stood off them in a different postcode. Ever the maximalist, Rooney overdid things by putting so many players so deep that Argyle had no way out. For a change Leeds didn't look frustrated by a packed defence and their patience felt destined to pay. They were going to score, and the only risk was that they might not, which is a good way of having the game in your own hands. With Junior Firpo on hand, taking free-kicks faster and faster while Plymouth were taking them slower and slower, it never felt like Leeds were going to let Argyle away with this.

Even so, despite their careful constructive dominance, the Peacocks' three goals came from the tips of their toes where there was less time or need to think. Dan James got the first with tidy timing on the half hour, after a corner, miscontrolling a pass on the edge of the penalty area and getting his mind made up as Plymouth players loomed: just hit the thing. It's good advice for a well-trained football player because the point of all that training is to separate your muscles from your thoughts and let your legs take over. We've done this before, his toes and thighs and calfs and knees told his brain, as the ball flew into the top corner. Less thinking, more kicking, a great goal.

It took three minutes for Joel Piroe to add another. Leeds sometimes get accused of sitting back after scoring, but after taking the lead they got Puma's size five Orbita back up to Plymouth's area and kept it there, bouncing it from various places until it went into the six yard box and, joy of joys, Joel sniffed it. Piroe spent a lot of time in Bristol last week drifting around the middle of the pitch, but here he was on the goalie's laces and fending off Bali Mumba like a kind of Allan Clarke to prod the ball over the line. Mumba was one of the few Argyle players who looked alright, until the second half when he fell over because he got hit with a stepover from Sam Byram, of all people. Piroe was also getting giddy: next time the ball was near him in the area, five minutes after he scored, he was trying to score again with a backheel like probably Tresor Kandol or someone. When the ball was blocked Brenden Aaronson zoomed in to put it in the net with a splash. Football really can be this easy.

It's a shame that United didn't turn the scoreline into a spectacular but it might have been wasted on this game. In its own more subtle way the second half was good for the soul as three players made their debuts from the bench. When a game isn't up to much, its always fun to be distracted by the future, where a lot of fans live anyway: what the team will be like one day can feel just as important as what the team is like today. The future is not likely to include Josuha Guilavogui, unless his charming arrival carries him through this debut of olés on the ball and into the dugout as player manager. But Sam Chambers and Charlie Crew might stick around, and it was good for the latter to cancel his Ian Harte-esque stat of playing more times for his national side than his club. Crew's shot from the edge of the area almost beat Daniel Grimshaw in goal; Chambers popped in a low cross that someone could have finished. He also dished out a strong touchline shoulderbarge in classic 'I may be a kid but I won't be pushed around' style. Anyone who thinks football isn't a sentimental game should have heard the cheers for these two and Guilavogui, a sweet outbreak of dads 'n' lads football in the Championship.

Sentimentality didn't help Adam Forshaw in Plymouth's midfield. Presumably we had him to thank for turning the teams around at kick-off. I like Adam Forshaw, which makes it me and Marcelo Bielsa, but after the coin toss this was a hard game for him to influence, despite carefully selecting his targets. In the first few minutes he chased down and shoved no less than Brenden Aaronson into giving up the ball; just before half-time he was involved in an exchange of tackles with Leeds United hard-man Daniel James. He played through the full ninety minutes, so at least his fitness is holding up, but I don't know about his morale. It felt like Wayne Rooney left him on so someone would be as miserable as him.

Rooney remains a fascinating case. There was plenty of time, after Leeds were 3-0 up, to wonder just what exactly he is doing with his life, standing on the touchline in Leeds pretending not to hear 36,000 people singing very mean songs about him.

"We set up with a game plan to try to stay in the game as long as we could," he said afterwards, "and then we had a lot of attacking options on the bench to come on and help us get something out of the game." The problem was that by the time he could have reasonably made any substitutions his team was 3-0 down. "We didn't get to that point in the game," he said, so he kept those attacking players out of it ahead of playing Portsmouth on Tuesday.

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For this, Plymouth are paying him I don't know how much? It's a game plan that any dope could have come up with, and I'm a little lost about the need for this dope, of all dopes. Rooney keeps getting credit for taking jobs lower down the leagues, instead of taking the Frank Lampard Junior or Steven Gerrard routes of assuming they can coach at the level they played at. But there are plenty of other coaches who could never go straight into the Chelsea or Rangers jobs but are itching for opportunities in the Football League, who could do just as badly as Rooney for a fraction of the wage. While he's not learning a damn thing down here, he's clogging up the pathway for young managers who might actually gain something from a job like this.

Or just get Neil Warnock to do it, fuck it, and I'm serious. Teams like Plymouth — and Plymouth specifically in the mid-1990s — and leagues like the Championship have been Neil Warnock's entire life. It's the stuff a certain strata of managers get out of bed for. Wayne Rooney is a world-level celebrity still trying to live like one while 'proving himself' as the next Ian Holloway, and for what? It's a mismatch and I actually think Lampard and Gerrard have it right by skipping all the learning-the-trade stuff. Celebrity has its own particular value but it's no good here. MLS was a good place for Rooney, although even there he failed to get DC United into the play-offs. Saudi Arabia might be a good option if his wig can hold on in the heat. MLS home-field fans might dispute this, against Apple's broadcast deal on the other side of the argument, but these leagues are televisual first, focused on presentation and star power. Rooney's name means something in those arenas, and the mediated close-ups on the touchline will be kinder to him than the raw attention he gets Leeds.

Or in Plymouth. Their fans don't need Wayne Rooney's fame at their club, they need a manager who won't drag them 300 miles to watch their confused eleven being defeated 3-0 before the first half is over. The European Super League felt like a hint of something coming in football's near future, a split in the sport which I could sense again in Real Madrid's tantrum about last week's Ballon d'Or, where the top levels become a celebrity driven Drive to Survive style quasi-reality show, and the rest is a competitive league sport played and watched in real life by actual people. It's no slight on Rooney that he would be happier, better off and better suited to the Netflix version of football's future, where his name means eyeballs. Maybe he needs to consider that he might not get those offers if he keeps dragging club after club down into League One.

We'll have to wait and see where 49ers Enterprises and Red Bull plonk Leeds if those days ever come to pass. At the moment the team's main fault is that it's nowhere near dramatic enough. This was another weekend of lunacy in the Championship. Watford, who were terrible against Leeds, beat Sheffield Wednesday 6-2. Coventry, who were etc, beat Middlesbrough 3-0. Cardiff, etc, beat Norwich. Burnley lost to Millwall and Sunderland only drew at QPR, with a Jobe Bellingham red card thrown in. The Peacocks, meanwhile, flew serenely through another game. They've won four games 2-0 and Saturday was their second 3-0, halfish the season so far won on cruise. Leeds are the tortoise that, last season, couldn't overtake two hares: admittedly one of them was driving a tractor, the other was riding a fox. There's no such competition this season, just the concern that, in the glitz-bang world of football, a tortoise isn't always that much fun to watch. That's a worry for another day. ⭑彡