This is the article:
"Something is stirring in Yorkshire, for a long while a bastion of footballing underachievement. There were 35,000 fans crammed into Elland Road on Friday night for Leeds’ top-six local derby fixture against Sheffield United.
It is many years since the supporters of either club were able to view promotion to the top flight from anything approaching a realistic perspective. On recent showing, it may still be a bit premature for the Leeds fans, frankly.
They have lost five of their past seven games in all competitions and were fairly comfortably beaten by the Blades. Only the excellence of their goalkeeper, Andy Lonergan, kept the score down to a respectable 2-1 and for long patches of the match they seemed disjointed, unaware of what they were supposed to be doing and strangely threatless going forward.
Well, I say strangely threatless — they are clearly missing their top scorer Chris Wood, who was flogged in late August to Burnley for a surprisingly cheap £15m. I am not sure why Premier League teams were hitherto reluctant to take a punt on the New Zealander — he was easily the best finisher outside the top division and has adjusted with consummate ease to playing at a higher level.
But anyway, given Leeds United’s decade of travails and humiliations, now is a time for guarded optimism. They remain in the top six despite that defeat. In the end, however, their own inconsistency might undo them.
Sheffield United, however, are something else entirely. They won the League One title last season at a canter, with 100 points, having spent the previous five seasons in this lowly berth flattering to deceive, always falling away when the hounds of spring were on winter’s traces.
And yet somehow manager Chris Wilder has instilled in them a resilience that was hitherto missing.
The Blades spent comparatively lightly in the summer, largely shoring up a sometimes dilatory defence with former Championship or League One arrivals for less than a million quid each.
Up front, Ched Evans is back at the club where he forged his reputation before that charge of rape was imposed upon him, but he has yet to put his name on the scoresheet.
The Blades look for their goals from hometown boy Billy Sharp — who always notches up better than one goal in two games when he is given a run in a settled team. But he is also 31 years old now.
The other forwards, Leon Clarke and Clayton Donaldson — both of them well past their 30th birthdays – contribute a few goals too. But on paper it is an ageing forward line that should not, in truth, strike the fear of God into Championship defences.
It is instead the sort of forward line that appears to be equipped to hoist a club out of the third tier. And yet the Blades are advancing with a certain imperious grandeur — Friday night’s win was their eighth in their past 10 games and yesterday they sat at the very top of the league.
They have become terribly difficult to beat, not as the consequence of the usual third-tier agricultural obduracy, but because they are singularly disinclined ever to let the opposition have the ball.
Sheffield United were less than usually effective at this possession business in the game against Leeds, which thoroughly annoyed Wilder. He was not exultant in his victory. “We were quite loose today . . . we usually keep the ball much better than that,” he said, before further castigating his team for having turned in the worst performance of the season so far.
Wilder, 50, is a Sheffield man himself, a former unremarkable journeyman pro player whose managerial track record in the lower leagues — with the likes of Northampton Town, Oxford United and Halifax Town — is kind of decent-ish, but in all honesty it is not much more than that.
He guided the Cobblers to promotion, having succeeded in saving them from relegation the season before. He is well regarded in the football world, a world which, nonetheless, he has not quite set alight — yet.
The last steel city derby in the Premier League took place more than 20 years ago, but given that Sheffield Wednesday appear to be sinking like a stone again, don’t pin your hopes on a recurrence in 2018-19.
In any case, three Yorkshire teams in the top tier is almost unheard of these days and more usually there is just one per season. Huddersfield Town are carrying the white rose banner at the moment, of course. Hell, even Sheffield’s most famous club — Sheffield FC, the oldest football club in the world — no longer ply their trade in Yorkshire, having decamped over the border to Dronfield in Derbyshire at the turn of the present century.
Sheffield United, meanwhile, last spent consecutive seasons in the top tier way back in 1994 and since then have had only one fleeting Premier League appearance, and that finished in rancour and legal action when West Ham United avoided the drop at their expense in 2006-7.
You may well remember all that hilarious business with Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano playing for West Ham when, perhaps, they should not have been playing for West Ham, and securing an unlikely win against Manchester United at Old Trafford on the very last day of the season.
The relegation battle between these two foes might well be reprised next season."
