Millwall 1-0 Leeds United: Always there

At least we learned one thing from this week's least surprising result: when it comes to set-pieces the deliveree is more important than the deliverer. Before this match, Leeds United's defensive hopes were raised by news that Millwall's expert taker of free-kicks and corners, Joe Bryan, was out of the game. Unfortunately Jake Cooper is still six foot six and this bigger frame was the bigger factor. Leeds' manager Daniel Farke would have got credit for pointing this out in his pre-match press conference if his players had done anything about it.

Maybe we could blame this entire defeat on Joe Rodon and Pascal Struijk. The numbers show Jake Cooper winning three aerial duels in his own penalty area and four in Leeds United's. Rodon and Struijk didn't win a header in either box. This might just be blaming them for not being half a foot taller, though. Or maybe it's blaming them for their football upbringings: a couple of seasons with Swansea, a bit of Spurs and Rennes, some Ajax academy and Under-23s football and one full season each in the Championship. Compare them to Cooper's simple path: 300 games in the Championship for Millwall. Bosh.

There's a saying that when someone tells you who they are, you should listen. On this subject Millwall are consistent, despite attempts to pull them in new directions. The club's community projects keep winning 'family club' awards. The Den is at the centre of a £1.9 billion redevelopment project that includes options for modernising and expanding the stadium to 34,000 seats, clearing out the old steel and breezeblock stands for timber and stone beneath a gently sweeping roof. A taste of that future was put on before the game as The Den hosted a contractually obliged lightshow on behalf of their lighting suppliers, who switched the big lamps on and off while 16,700 people booed them. This is all supposed to appeal to new sponsors, new corporate partners and new generations of supporters, but maybe Millwall have been looking in the wrong direction with this stuff. The other lesson of the week, apart from big lads at set-pieces, seems to be that strong mean poses are back in style, that 'No one likes us, we don't care' is an attitude people want to buy into.

Meanwhile Millwall exerts a gravitational pull that means it will always be Millwall. Their record sale by some distance was the £8 million Middlesbrough paid them for George Saville in 2018. In 2021 Millwall bought him back for less than a quarter of that and he's still there. They keep thinking they can do better than Neil Harris, as a player and as a manager, then thriving in relief when they go back to him. He's been with Millwall, off and on, since 1998. He's got them doing very Millwall things this season — only allowing more than 1.5 expected goals against them in two of fourteen games, making of their seven games before Leeds a 0-1 defeat, a 0-0 draw, a 1-1 draw then three 1-0 wins in a row — because they're Millwall, and they're good at Millwalling. They beat Burnley 1-0 at The Den on Sunday when Cooper headed in a cross from a long throw's second phase. It wasn't really a surprise that Millwall did much the same to Leeds.

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That makes it harder to take, though. Before the game, Daniel Farke talked in his press conference about methods Leeds would have to use to stop Jake Cooper. "Disturb him so that he doesn't have a free and clear header," he said. "We have also strong headers in our team, like Pascal, like Joe Rodon and all the others." Hmm. Gnonto? Anyway, we know how that turned out. "The better we are in possession and the less long throw-ins, corner kicks, wide area free kicks we allow, the easier our life will be," he said. Leeds gave the ball away 21 times, conceded two corners and gave away four wide area free-kicks. And to his players, Farke said afterwards, he'd talked about the importance of second balls:

(Cooper) is a giant, he's just too tall. But you have to make sure that he can't score and that you are there for second balls, because that's what they always try — to find him on the far post, he knocks the ball down and they are there for the second phase. And the problem was we spoke about this, we showed the scenes, and we had obviously players, two players for Tanganga for the area, who should have dropped with him. Yes, and after this long ball to Cooper, they were just standing around the box line and not dropping, and then Tanganga is there and says thank you, put the ball away, a centre-back who decides the game.

That was that, then, coaching staff who told the players how to defend against their opponent's main threat and players who didn't act on that in the game. But apart from that Farke says he was happy with everything else. "I am not annoyed at all," he said. "(We were) excellent in the first half. We created more chances around their box than the last four away teams here in total." The only hitch was in the last third, he said, where his players lacked "awareness" of their best opportunities and "tidiness" to finish them. "There is no major thing we have to change," he said. "It's more like effectiveness in the final third and to play without a mistake."

Farke might not have minded the match but I'm not sure the players were so sanguine. They are the ones on the pitch feeling the purgatory, and while it might be their own fault, that was always the point of purgatory anyway and doesn't make it any easier to bear. Junior Firpo seemed to be playing with a death wish in the last ten minutes. After watching Mateo Joseph almost score a second for Millwall by whacking Cooper's knockdown off his own post, Firpo got a yellow card for a big ol' foul right where that set-piece had been crossed from. Up the other end in stoppage time a near post corner onto Illan Meslier's head was halted mid-failure due to pushing in the penalty area; from the retake Manor Solomon and Meslier tried the same move again. Farke had made his typical late changes, counting on stoppage time they could use that never came, bringing on as he put it "more or less all the players who can score a goal like Patrick Bamford or Mateo Joseph" alongside Joel Piroe. (Joffy Gelhardt was injured.)

Leeds ended up looking like a team who knew that wasn't going to work, playing in front of travelling fans who knew it wouldn't work, against a team that knows that what it's doing works. Which was annoying on the night but not the end of the story. For all Neil Harris and Millwall are effective soulmates, as manager he's never got them above 8th in the Championship, and when they came up from League One it was through the play-offs after finishing 6th. For all Leeds' dopiness conceding at The Den only three teams have let in fewer goals in the Championship, and for all the frustration up front only two teams have scored more. Those teams are Norwich, who spent this week losing 2-1 at Cardiff and 2-0 at Sheffield Wednesday, and top of the table Sunderland, who drew 0-0 at Preston in midweek after drawing 0-0 at QPR on Saturday. After the international break Sunderland are off to The Den to play Millwall. I wonder how they'll get on. ⭑彡