Sheffield Wednesday 3-0 Leeds United: Bigger Bruises
Midweek on the playing fields, The Championship thwacks you on the knees, it knees you in the groin, it elbows in the face, leaves bruises bigger than dinner plates.
As Sunday lunchtime ticked past, relentless, Thomas Christiansen's brow deepened into furrows that, by the time Kieran Lee accepted his extra helping of dessert from Eunan O'Kane and made the score 3-0, looked like permanent fixtures on his youthful face. Youthful before he came to Leeds United, anyway.
It was fair for Christiansen to look confused. Leeds United fans have seen a lot more Championship football than he has, and many more Leeds games like this one, and we're confused, too.
Perhaps Thomas will conclude, as Leeds fans did long ago, that life just isn't fair. For the second time in a week he prepared a side that would counteract its next opponent so its own virtues could blossom, then stood and watched as a goal ripped the finery from United, who spent the rest of the game struggling to recover their poise, restring their corsets, and step daintily back into the fray.
Christiansen was right that the opening twenty-seven minutes in Cardiff were decent. Mateusz Klich lost the ball after twenty-seven minutes and eight seconds, but rewatching the match up until that point, I saw Leeds United doing much that was necessary against Neil Warnock's team. Attacks kept breaking down at the point of Pablo Hernandez, and Leeds had barely played a pass left of Sol Bamba, ignoring Stuart Dallas, but United were dominating possession and not too troubled at the back. As opening half hours against league leading sides managed by absolute twats go, it was working very well, until Klich undid it three minutes short of that landmark.
You could say the same about United at Hillsborough, only this time Samuel Saiz was in the team, and so the Pablo pinch point was eradicated. For the first twenty minutes Saiz glided around Sheffield, building a shrine to himself as the first act of a performance that promised to be worth its own place of worship. It wasn't only the skill, when he dribbled between tacklers and ran towards goal, or the strength, holding off Wednesday players as his influence grew and their tackles grew more desperate. But in the first six minutes Saiz played two passes across the pitch to players who didn't even know themselves how good their positions were, until Saiz made their situations glorious with one kick of the football. For Kalvin Phillips and Kemar Roofe, the recipients, it was like going to the corner shop for a fizzy snake and being presented with the keys to a sweet factory.
As at Cardiff, all Leeds United had to do was keep doing their thing and let the win come to them, or in this case, let Saiz go and get it. Instead, as at Cardiff, they let Sheffield Wednesday take the lead, and never looked the same again.