Sheffield Wednesday 0-2 Leeds United: Long story

That first half though. Oof, forget about it. Wipe it from the memory, move on, from most of it, anyway. Illan Meslier: great save. After Huddersfield scored from a set-piece the other week, here came more trouble from a corner, a scramble in the goal mouth, une bousculade dans la bouche du but. And here was Spider Boy, processing the world at a different speed, spreading his limbs like Polyfilla, diverting a point blank shot wide of the goal. Remember that bit.

Let’s also take with us another moment from another Sheffield Wednesday corner, when Junior Firpo butted heads with Joe Rodon, and the game was stopped for – stopwatches out! – three minutes and fifty seconds. Despite the fad for finickity timekeeping the referees’ digital boards have not yet been upgraded to include decimal separators, so at the end of the first half the fourth official held up a sign suggesting a minimum extension of four minutes to account for Rodon’s bloody brow and everything else that had held the game up. The other column could include stuff like the fifty seconds it took Wednesday goalie James Beadle to take a goal kick during that time added on: if you wanted to be petty about it, that four looked low. But taurine-addled Wednesday boss Danny Röhl, also processing the world at a different, Red Bull flavoured speed, saw a big red digital four and wanted no more, no less, than for the first half to last 49 minutes exactly. The greatest joy of the first half, then, was Pat Bamford scoring the opening goal, with the clock showing 49m11s. 

“It was a key point,” Röhl said afterwards. “Of course he showed four minutes and then it was four minutes (and) more – and everyone can think about if this is a key moment.” I mean, we could. Probably not going to though, if I’m honest, because it would be a ridiculous waste of, ironically, time. “I’m really not happy about this moment,” Röhl went on, making it funnier.

All this is very petty, and extremely pedantic, and maybe in a larger sense it’s another symptom of the VAR age. The grand failure of VAR has come from the wrong answer to the question, just because we can, should we? We can draw offside lines down to a millimetre, but should we? We can replay fouls through frozen frame slo-mos for hours, but should we? We can add up every second the ball is out of play and extend games, then add on the delays during the extension and extend them some more, then add on the delays during the extensions of the extensions and extend them some more, until games last so long Watford are firing and hiring managers during added time, but should we? Or should we just go with the flow when the referee says they’ll add a minimum of four minutes to roughly approximate the time lost, and then does just that?

Leeds got suckered from the other end of this last weekend, when Huddersfield’s experimental diversions into competitive shoelace tying kept the first half going long enough for them to score a goal and shortened the second half so that Leeds couldn’t score more than one. Leeds looked ready for a rest that day, weary and fractious, sighing and bickering, and they’ve played twice more in the week since. They’ve got through them, but it’s hard to say that Leeds United have been good in these three games, unless you’re Daniel Farke. The 1-0 win over Stoke was, to him, “The best win in 2024.” After the win over Wednesday, he talked about Bamford’s goal like this: “I’ll tell you what, everyone speaks about a goal that he scored at Peterborough in the cup, a worldy. This is for me also like a world-class striker goal.”

The worse Leeds have played the better Farke has liked it, because the performances have had an obvious cause – fatigue – but still met the necessary target – results. After drawing in Huddersfield, Farke said he’d be happy to win every remaining home game, and draw all the aways: “If we do like this, we would finish the season with 96 points and this is happy days.” A win at Hillsborough puts Leeds two points ahead of that target, and two points closer to Leicester City, and a place ahead of Ipswich Town. This is happy days, however it’s achieved.

It was achieved in Sheffield by veering away from prettiness, “football fireworks” in Farke’s phrase, towards the effectiveness Leeds have at times been lacking this season. Make what you will of expected goals, but stats from Hillsborough expected two goals of Leeds, and two goals is what they scored, just the thing for sending Farke to his sofa with his cake, his coffee, and a great flump of satisfaction. World class, he said, words to make Crysencio Summerville wince, because he might look at these two strikes and shudder at the memory of his month in Sam Allardyce country, a year ago. The stoppage time goal came from Ethan Ampadu chipping long onto defender Bambo Diaby’s head, Summerville, Georginio Rutter and Glen Kamara scrambling to win the second ball, and Wilf Gnonto giving Firpo space to cross for the original Bambo, losing his markers and finishing at the far post. Goal two, just before the hour, came from a free-kick that Meslier banged downfield, where Bamford held off a defender and prodded the ball to Rutter, who diverted it first time behind Wednesday’s wobbly backline for Gnonto to run through and shoot, simple as that. 

I hate to imagine a world in which Big Sam had stayed, or even stayed on the end of the phone to pick up consultancy fees whenever Karl Robinson got in trouble. But I can’t mind it when, in the toughest part of the season, Farke’s Leeds start reaping the benefits of just getting it fucking launched. It’s not completely new, as once Ampadu moved to defence and Bamford returned up front, long balls from one to the other became a feature. At Hillsborough, though, they moved from nicety to necessity. From around the 20th minute, when United’s passing, moving and Ilia Grueving was fraying, Ampadu took charge of connecting ball to mixer, if that’s not underselling the placement of his chips into the paths first of Bamford – who couldn’t control and get a shot away – then of Rutter, who forced a save then a clearance with two shots, then Rutter again, who got into the penalty area but was offside. Those passes had a neatness that the stoppage time lob onto Diaby’s head did not, but we know which one worked. 

Ampadu’s overall influence shouldn’t be undersold, nor that of Rodon and Meslier. As Big Sam or Sean Dyche will tell you, this way of playing only prospers if the team is solid at the back. Ampadu and Rodon’s partnership, plus Meslier either coming into form or revealing he’s been in form all along but hasn’t had to show it, has given Leeds a different emphasis as the games have piled up this year. Their steady stomp-stomp-stomp up the league to 2nd has been built on clean sheets, while Leicester were losing three games by conceding seven goals, and Ipswich Town’s cavalier attitude to goals against finally caught up with them in Cardiff. At Hull on Saturday, Leicester needed 37-year-old Jamie Vardy to equalise twice, under the sort of pressure that Leeds United’s young forwards, thanks to their also-young defence, are not under. Summerville might look critically at the ball being humped high over him, but from looking at him, he’s been risking getting lost in self-criticism, without a goal or assist in five games. Those long balls are Ampadu’s way of lifting the load up off him, a ‘thanks mate’ for the fifteen goals and eight assists from the rest of the time. 

Back to that sofa, the coffee and the cake. Daniel Farke has made this season all about his seen it all and ridden the horse approach to the Championship, balancing his experience like a seesaw plank on a pivot of temperamental kids. Back in autumn he was already warning that the “football fireworks” are the easy part, even as fans fretted over his team’s ability to play through packed Champo defences. The bangers have gone off damp over the last week, but Farke isn’t being weird when he says that impresses him more than a thirty-yard super-volley into the top corner. Leeds have proven themselves as Champo masters of flair. If they’ve extended their prowess to getting it in the mixer, what’s left to be asked of them, in the next two months, that they can’t answer? ⭑彡