As the upbeat, full-volume, strains of Status Quo’s Rocking All Over The World greeted the final whistle Daniel Farke bounded on to the pitch and made a point of embracing every Leeds player.
Twelve wins and a draw in the past 13 league games have lifted the German’s side to the top of the Championship for the first time this season – above the one-time runaway leaders, Leicester, on goal difference.
With Ipswich and Southampton still also very much in the hunt for the two automatic promotion places nothing is guaranteed but, with eight games remaining, Leeds may just have hit the front at precisely the right moment.
The erosion of the 17 point advantage Leicester held over his team at new year emphasises that Farke is evidently building something very special at Elland Road. Although Leicester have a game in hand, Leeds, significantly, boast the second tier’s best defensive record.
“I’m very proud of the boys, they have so much unity in the dressing room,” Farke said after his players rose above Millwall’s streetwise spoiling tactics, refusing to be provoked into a series of distracting feuds.
“If we don’t enjoy this moment then, one day, we will ask ourselves why? But we also have to make sure we stay on it and remain in a similar position at the end.”
It took Leeds 33 minutes to breach the barricade of bright orange-shirted Millwall defenders. Wilfried Gnonto’s glorious change of pace enabled the Italy winger to cut inside and, having switched feet without breaking stride, direct a fabulously unerring left‑foot shot between Matija Sarkic and a post.
If the finish was sublime so, too, was Patrick Bamford’s defender-confounding decoy manoeuvre. Despite a recent renaissance, the centre-forward still has his critics in West Yorkshire but anyone doubting the depth of Bamford’s talent would surely have thought twice after watching the striker take a millisecond to assess Gnonto’s intentions before cutting across a marker and cleverly creating invaluable space for his teammate.
Farke’s team should probably have had a penalty before half‑time but instead the perhaps overly laid‑back referee, Stephen Martin, inflamed local angst by taking a lenient view of Jake Cooper’s high knee in Joe Rodon’s face.
Given he had been booked earlier after an ultimately comedic bout of wrestling with Gnonto, and was also involved in a couple of other contentious incidents, Cooper could count himself more than slightly fortunate to have got away with that one.
With Ilia Gruev affording Leeds a decent amount of control from central midfield, Farke’s side were dominant yet failed to test Sarkic’s reflexes as frequently as their manager might have hoped.
The obduracy of Millwall’s meticulously organised low block made it easy to see how they had not merely remained unbeaten but collected 10 points during the preceding quartet of games after Neil Harris returned for his fourth stint at the Den.
Although the visitors remain just four points clear of the relegation zone, on this largely reassuring evidence the former Millwall striker should comfortably succeed in banishing relegation fears from the Den.
His team enjoyed a slice of luck when, after Crysencio Summerville’s defence bisecting left‑wing advance, the impressive Georginio Rutter forced Sarkic into a gravity defying double save, but they never made things easy for Leeds.
Indeed, galvanised by a quadruple substitution and newly on the front foot, Millwall very nearly equalised when George Saville’s deflected shot fell to Cooper only for the afternoon’s pantomime villain to shoot wide from close range. Michael Obafemi subsequently danced past Rodon and Archie Gray but miscued under pressure from Ethan Ampadu.
Farke’s players heeded the double warning and it took an excellent 11th‑hour clearance from Japhet Tanganga to divert Bamford’s goalbound shot before Dan James, on as a substitute, finally doubled the home side’s advantage.
Rutter had already conjured Gnonto’s opener and his cross enabled James to deceive Joe Bryan before placing a left-foot shot through a thicket of legs from the edge of the six‑yard box. “I thought Leeds deserved to win,” Harris said. “They are a Premier League team in waiting.”
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