Habib Diarra’s decisive penalty for streetwise Sunderland sees off Leeds

Habib Diarra’s decisive penalty for streetwise Sunderland sees off Leeds Sunderland departed West Yorkshire 13 months ago on a snowy February night with their hopes of automatic promotion from the Championship seemingly in tatters. Leeds had come from behind to clinch a 95th-minute victory that took them top of the second tier and only the most optimistic visiting fans expected a rematch this season. Fast-forward to a balmy March evening though and Régis Le Bris’s well executed game-plan lifted Sunderland to the 40-point mark and 11th place in the Premier League . Who, last February, could seriously have imagined that the eventual playoff winners would be four places and nine points ahead of Daniel Farke’s team today? An injury-hit Sunderland arrived very much in containment mode. Le Bris’s players duly devoted the first half to protecting their debutant goalkeeper, Melker Ellborg, and frustrating Leeds fans in equal measure. The 22-year-old Ellborg, a £3m, 22-year-old, arrival from Malmö in January, was deputising for the hamstrung Robin Roefs. His teammates happily ceded plenty of possession to Leeds but their off the ball positioning was so suffocating that bar expertly turning an Anton Stach free-kick around a post, Mellborg had relatively little to do. Enzo Le Fée is Sunderland’s brightest creative talent but, with the left sided midfielder’s evening spent largely in industrious tracking-back mode rather than picking defence bisecting passes, the Leeds goalkeeper, Karl Darlow, was even less involved than his Swedish counterpart. When Ellborg collapsed, clutching a hamstring, following a fairly innocuous looking collision with Dominic Calvert-Lewin and required lengthy treatment, Elland Road regulars became seriously annoyed. With the visiting players taking drinks and clustering around Le Bris their boos – not to mention chants of “What the fuck is going on” – suggested that time-wasting was suspected. Like Farke, Sunderland’s manager had arranged his side in a...