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.
