Ao Tanaka sat in the away dressing room and started crying. The Japan midfielder had just helped Leeds win a vital match at Middlesbrough this month but they were not tears of joy. “I asked Ao: ‘Why?’” said his manager, Daniel Farke. “He said: ‘I don’t know boss, I’m just so empty.’”
Given it is April and, with four games remaining, a gruelling, painfully tight, Championship promotion race is drawing towards a denouement, no one seemed too surprised. “It’s hard for all my players at the moment,” said Farke, whose team could, like Burnley, be promoted as early as Easter Monday. “We’re working for the most emotional club in the UK and the outside world is always nervous and panicking.”
The underlying problem is that three cannot fit into two and one of Leeds, Burnley and Sheffield United will miss out on automatic promotion to the Premier League. They must, instead, galvanise themselves to join Sunderland and, most likely, two from Bristol City, Coventry, Middlesbrough, Millwall and West Brom in the playoffs.
If Sheffield United are to avoid this fate they need to close the five-point gap with Burnley and Leeds that has opened up after Chris Wilder’s side lost their past three matches. An awful lot may hinge on the Blades’ trip to Turf Moor on Monday evening, particularly as they have a vastly inferior goal difference.
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“Anxiety sort of crept into the players and they’ve made mistakes they’ve not been making all season,” said Wilder who, far from immune to the tension, became embroiled in a heated tunnel altercation after last Saturday’s reverse at Plymouth. “We have to deal with it a lot better. This is big boys’ football.”
Tellingly, his Burnley counterpart, Scott Parker, has worked with a personal psychologist for years and is convinced many of the mistakes that trigger season-defining moments are pressure-induced and “more mental than technical”.
Parker, like Farke and Wilder, knows what leading a team out of the second tier takes. He has celebrated two promotions from the Championship (with Fulham and Bournemouth), the same number of as Farke (both at Norwich) and one more than Wilder (with Sheffield United).
Burnley have lost only twice, keeping 29 clean sheets while conceding 13 league goals. That is thanks partly to James Trafford’s excellence – and it is easy to see why Newcastle are so keen on Burnley’s goalkeeper.
Burnley, like Leeds, require a maximum of seven points to go up. The recent stumble which brought Farke’s team one win in six and informed the German’s transformative, yet potentially high-risk, decision to replace Illan Meslier with Karl Darlow in goal seems set to become an academic footnote to an excellent campaign.
After Leeds lost last season’s playoff final to Southampton Farke was adamant they would have secured automatic promotion had Patrick Bamford not injured a knee last April. A year on his number 9 is finally fit again and, with Joël Piroe’s goals having dried up at an awkward moment, Bamford may prove to be the right striker at the right time to help lead Leeds over the line. “Patrick’s not scared of the spotlight,” said Farke. “His experience and smartness can help us.”
Not that inexperience has exactly held back Régis Le Bris. Sunderland’s head coach had never managed at first-team level three years ago and could not speak English. Today the Frenchman, formerly a long-serving Lorient youth coach, is bilingual and has built a tactically articulate, if slightly inconsistent, team capable of beating anyone.
If rivals will not relish facing Enzo Le Fée, Jobe Bellingham and the rest of Le Bris’s vibrant young players in the playoffs, no one underestimates Frank Lampard’s latest side. Coventry’s decision to sack Mark Robins in November initially appeared ruthlessly self-destructive but Lampard is vying with two fellow former England midfielders, Parker and Middlesbrough’s Michael Carrick, for a place in football’s promised land.
Could Coventry’s final home game, against Middlesbrough on May 3rd, prove decisive? “When I came in [we] were 17th,” Lampard said. “Now our season’s probably going right to the last day.”
If Carrick’s players have underachieved, Bristol City’s manager, Liam Manning has, in a personal context, experienced the worst campaign imaginable of an eclectic coaching journey encompassing, among other clubs, New York City FC and Belgium’s Lommel.
Last October, Manning’s world was devastated by the death of his baby son Theo but he has astounded colleagues by returning from compassionate leave to offer City real hope of an inaugural season in the Premier League sun.
As Nahki Wells, Manning’s influential, 34-year-old Bermuda striker explained: “There’s no big egos, no big names, just a team that’s together and hungry to grow. The manager’s kept us humble and got everyone performing at a high level.”
A Wembley final pitting Manning against West Brom’s Tony Mowbray would be especially poignant. More immediately Mowbray, well again after a year’s gruelling treatment for bowel cancer, faces a pivotal Good Friday derby at Coventry.
Alex Neil cannot be discounted from the promotion conversation either. Although Millwall’s manager has never quite fulfilled the precocious potential he displayed when guiding Norwich to promotion as a 33-year-old in 2015 few doubt the spiky Scot’s ability.
“We’ve given ourselves a chance,” said Neil. “We need to play without fear now. There’s really nothing to be scared of.”
