One of the curious things about supporting a lower league football team is just how little you actually end up watching full games involving other teams in your division. Whilst a Premier League fan with the right TV subscriptions is likely to know a lot of their opponents inside out, in the Championship and League One there’s a good chance you only see an entire 90 minutes of the rest of the league twice a season, otherwise relying on statistics, highlights packages and podcasts to shape your opinion of them.
One manifestation of this is the habitual fan reaction to any award that the EFL gives out. The modal response, part bias, part low info, is usually the same - “does [best footballer in my team] play golf?” I must confess I had similar feelings about the EFL Team of the Season, where to my uneducated eye one player for the team that was top of the league seemed a bit stingy and a couple of the choices looked pretty flimsy. On the basis of watching Jacob Greaves play for Hull on one of our most comfortable nights all season (he’s one of the two statues that Conor Chaplin bends the ball round for our second goal), I can’t see what got him a mini-gong, but he might well have been more impressive in the other 3,420 minutes he’s played this season.
Kyle Walker-Peters looked another strange one to me. Massive reputation, very experienced senior player, full England international, £20m fees discussed in the Summer and according to Saints fans more or less their best player. Yet, despite he and the TOTS left back (our Leif Davis) being similarly attacking, the gulf in productivity between them has been massive. Davis has nineteen goal contributions to Walker-Peters’ six. Obviously, this is partially testament to Leif’s ridiculous numbers, breaking Kieran Trippier’s divisional record for assists by a defender and closing in on Harry Wilson’s overall record (19), set as the main attacking focus in a title-winning Fulham team. If £20m was the going rate for 27-year-old Walker-Peters, heaven knows what we’d ask for Davis.
Like I say though, I don’t watch enough of these players to have a right to a proper opinion of them and maybe Walker-Peters’ modest stats hide some outstanding pre-assists. It’s unusual for me to sit down and watch a Championship game we aren’t involved in. For most of the season that includes direct rivals. It always struck me as rather pointless to hope the team above you loses in November, when you’ve no idea if you’ll even be in the same section of the table come the Spring. It’s only around March and April when I get properly invested in results around us, when the voyeurism kicks in.
I rather enjoy this part of the season. Watching the others is usually a low-risk thrill, the potential pleasure of an adverse result for your opponents is always weightier than the disappointment of them winning as expected. Over the last 7 days playing the voyeur has been a luxurious experience, as it was during Sheffield Wednesday’s mini-implosion was last season. Millwall, Sunderland, Plymouth, Blackburn, it was a procession of teams having largely unsatisfactory seasons, who had all donated 6 much appreciated points to the Ipswich Town promotion fund. Each had looked wretched in the very recent past and presumably steeled themselves for difficult games against far superior opposition. Each gave a more resilient performance than us assorted gawkers and motivated bystanders could have dreamed of.
Just before the hour mark, Millwall squad player Ryan Longman, 23 years old, on loan from Hull City, in just his third start since the beginning of January, picked up the ball wide on the Left against Leicester and drove at the retreating Harry Winks. He dipped inside the England international and arced a dreamy shot over the right hand of Championship goalkeeper of the season Mads Hermansen. Leicester failed to make anything of the half hour they had to salvage something, although they did force a goal line clearance that sent poor Abdul Fatawu into convulsions. Enzo Maresca used his post-match presser to work on his 1996-Kevin Keegan vibes.
Us intrusive peeping toms demanded an encore the following Friday Night and Leicester obliged with another stutter at the feisty Home Park. “Always a tough place to go”, we’d said all week without much conviction, but the Pilgrims very much made it so. By the end of the 90 minutes I was even cheering on aggro-former-Canary Bali Mumba as he stuck doggedly to Fatawu, who constituted the Foxes main threat alongside the illegally good (both in a stepover-top-bins-curler sense and in a financial fair play sense) Stephy Mavadidi. Plymouth the Champions of League One and champions of my heart just for one night. Nul point for the week for Leicester, whose obvious merits and flaws overlap so considerably, you could see their last 4 games going the same way. You can’t get the ball off them for long periods, which is a pretty great way to defend, but they never risk giving it away, so you can settle in and get comfy out of possession if you want. Counter-intuitively they also seem to markedly deteriorate when they make substitutes.
If Leicester’s mega-wobble looks long-standing and systemic, Leeds United’s looks more contingent and temporary to me (which is shame given their respective league table positions). They’re still imperious defensively, Joe Rodon in particular reads the game spectacularly well. Their attack may only be functional (especially considering the component parts) but functional is plenty when you barely concede. Somehow though the best home team in the division spurned what surely every gambler in Britain had down as six sweet points. So toothless were they against Sunderland that they were reduced to moaning about not getting a penalty for handball, always a bad sign.
Leeds-Blackburn I listened to on the radio as I travelled to Portman Road. Audio-only was the ideal way to keep my heart rate under control. When you’re watching a game desperate for the stronger team to lose, visuals are panic-inducing, every period of possession, every drive into space has the potential to kill off your hopes. Listening to audio only though, the commentators keep you chill. Like watching the flight attendant during bad turbulence, you know if they’re calm you can be calm. As the game went on, both commentators started worrying about Leeds lacking penetration and talking more about Blackburn’s threat on the counter. I had my headphones on walking over the Princes Street Bridge when everyone’s favourite spiky Hungaro-Celt Colcestrian Sammie Szmodics scored, allowing me to send a cheer rippling back up the road all the way to the train station. After inexplicably throwing away home points, Leeds will feel like they need two maximums in their next two aways to really put the pressure on us (they’ve only won 48% of the away games to date).
My week was so taken up by eavesdropping and rubbernecking, that it's taken me more than a thousand words to even get to our games. That’s what involvement at the sharp end of the season does to you. Too many places to look.
For what it’s worth, Watford and Middlesbrough both gave a good account of themselves, despite being largely on the beach and two points turned out to be an excellent return. We could have won both or either, but so could Leeds and Leicester. I told you it would be attritional. Two weeks to reset and recharge before the biggest week for the football club for, well, 12 months. I’d rather be us than anyone else right now, but that might change by the time we play again. Before then, there will be four more opportunities for voyeurism.
Blue and White Notes Opposition Team of the Season (arbitrarily based on the 90-180 minutes I watched them and excluding a few players who were too obvious)
GK - Daniel Bachmann (Watford) - Is this recency bias? I thought he looked excellent in all aspects last week.
RB - Ethan Laird (Birmingham) - A QPR mate had Laird down as a bit mixed during his loan spell there but I thought he was really key to Birmingham’s dominant first hour against us at St. Andrews
LB - Harry Pickering (Blackburn) - I always think a full back who picks up an early yellow card against a tricky winger is in trouble but it rarely seems to work out that way. Pickering chopped Omari Hutchinson early in that game, but was then flawless in defence and progressive with the ball.
CB - Cedric Kipre (West Brom) - The Baggies were a juggernaut against us in November and having two big CBs who ate George Hirst alive was a big part of it.
CB - Joe Rodon (Leeds) - Obvious, but I really struggled to think of another centre back who looked as effortlessly good as Rodon did at Elland Road.
CM - Emmanouil Siopis (Cardiff) - Cardiff suffocated our midfield both times we played them and Siopis was a proper terrier.
CM - Okay Yokuslu (West Brom) - His team-mate Alex Mowatt took a lot of the plaudits, but I thought Yokuslu was everywhere in the first half at the Hawthorns.
RW - Joe Aribo (Southampton) - Can you believe some Southampton fans don’t really rate him? Was untouchable at Portman Road, we simply couldn’t get the ball off him. Huge relief when Russell Martin inexplicably withdrew him.
AM - Callum O’Hare (Coventry) - I’m a sucker for a flair player with his socks rolled down. Only just back from a long term injury when Coventry visited in December but still just a velvety footballer.
LW - Jamal Lowe (Swansea) - Harry Clarke seemed to be marking the opposition’s best player one-on-one every week for a couple of months. Lowe was the standout with a slalom consolation goal to show for it.
CF - Tom Eaves/Jordan Hugill (Rotherham) - Prior to Rotherham’s trip to Portman Road, I don’t think I’d seen a team go with a Big Man-Big Man combo for years. It really worked, I think Burgess and Woolfenden usually tag team this profile of striker, but Eaves and Hugill were such a handful together, I’ve put them together because I don’t think I could tell you which one was actually good.