With a cacophony of boos still ringing in his ears, Stoke manager Narcis Pelach tried to explain the difficulties of setting a team up to face Leeds United in the Championship. Try and press Leeds high up the pitch, and that leaves the one thing Dan James and co crave: space. Sit back, attempt to soak up pressure, and hope that a result will somehow materialise, and “it’s just [like] you are not trying.” Ultimately, Pelach decided, “We have to put this to bed quick, the Leeds United one, because at the end of the day they are a team that is out of our league, and this is a reality. You are going to win one in ten against them.”

It says a lot about Leeds’ status in the Championship this season. We hear this stuff every week from opposition managers. But it also says a lot about the challenge facing Leeds this season. Daniel Farke can’t afford to brush off defeats, move on to the next game, and ask what the hell he was meant to do. Leeds need to win and win and win, then keep winning. And that’s not an easy skill to master, particularly on a day when results elsewhere meant only a win would return United to the top two. “They are young human beings and some of them are playing for the first time under this pressure,” Farke said afterwards. “We don’t have too many title winners in our team. We have a few from the past under Marcelo but all the others have, if I’m really honest, a few more relegations than titles under the belt. And for that it’s sometimes tricky.”

Stoke might be rubbish, but for Farke this was a test of whether his players possess what the writer Tom Wolfe termed The Right Stuff. Last season, Leeds conspired to lose at Stoke with an own-goal and a missed penalty, before back-to-back defeats at Christmas left a mountain to climb that they eventually fell six points short of. Wolfe was writing about fighter pilots and astronauts, for whom the stakes were — believe it or not — much higher than losing at Wembley, although that didn’t engender much more sympathy from their contemporaries. If a plane went kaboom! with a pilot still inside, well, boy, that’s a shame, but that just meant the pilot clearly didn’t have The Right Stuff. As they were gradually left behind, the anointed ones who possessed that indefinable quality continued moving up the pyramid, believing that one day they ‘might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of The Right Stuff itself.’

While winning at Stoke to go top of the league at the halfway point of the campaign doesn’t prove Leeds belong in the Brotherhood — even with the added twist of a dense fog, the cliche of a cold night in Stoke no longer instils fear like it once did — it does suggest this team are making winning more of a habit that might just earn them an invitation.

United still needed to show resilience in handling the pressure of dropping to 4th, knowing they needed to arrest their patchy away form not to be left, as so much of last season, on the outside of the top two looking in, left behind like those pilots whose ascents ended in a blazing fireball.

Illan Meslier was alert in saving a Stoke chance with his feet inside the opening two minutes; it was a save you’d expect him to make, but they’re often the ones Meslier forgets about, and it meant Leeds avoided their kryptonite of chasing a game away from home while a goal down. Given a platform by their goalkeeper, Meslier’s teammates took over from there. Stoke didn’t have another shot in the rest of the first half.

With Ethan Ampadu restored to midfield in place of the rested Ao Tanaka, Leeds’ captain helped Pascal Struijk and Joe Rodon deal with the physical battle against striker Tom Cannon, who resorted to standing on toes and shoving in backs in lieu of getting a touch of the ball. Before long, the Peacocks began creating chances with the steady regularity of one of their trademark patient batterings. Dan James nearly forced an own goal after emerging from the mist down the right wing, Brenden Aaronson and Jayden Bogle forced saves from the edge of the penalty area, Joel Piroe ballooned a header over, and Manor Solomon squandered an open net by meeting James’ cross with his knee.

But Leeds kept probing, testing whether Stoke could keep up physically and mentally. After making their opponents chase left and right all half, Leeds cut straight through the middle, Joe Rothwell and Aaronson playing two quick, incisive passes to put Piroe through on goal. Viktor Johansson stopped Piroe going around him, but could do nothing about Piroe lashing the rebound in off the bar with a ruthless finish.

When Piroe plays like this it makes me yearn for him to do it every week. “Obviously we’d prefer if he scores a brace in each game,” Farke said, “but then he’d end up with, what, 92 goals — so sometimes even he has games he doesn’t score.” But not only is Piroe the one player in the squad who could have converted that chance so emphatically, he was turning defenders with crisp touches and bringing teammates into play, misplacing just one pass all night, when so often the ball bounces off him and to an opposition player in midfield, Becchio-lite. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The mist engulfing the pitch is what I imagine the inside of Piroe’s brain looks like behind his hazy eyes, and in the middle of the fog he was pure hotboxin’.

Piroe could have made it 2-0 shortly after break, heading wide from a corner, before Ashley Phillips did the same with the hosts’ only chance of the second half. While the commentators were crowing about Stoke beginning to threaten, Leeds were quietly managing an away game to perfection, halting any momentum by accepting Cannon’s invitation to waste time after fouls, waiting for the perfect opportunity to kill the game off. It didn’t take long. Three minutes after Phillips’ chance, Bogle’s pass put James into space in the penalty area, and his lobbed cross landed onto Piroe’s head for a simple second. The plaudits went to the goalscorer, as usual, but the goal was fittingly created by the two players pushing him for the title of the best player on the pitch. We might expect such consistent excellence from James these days, but Bogle played like the right-back we thought we’d signed all along, never stopping running from the first minute to the last.

Leeds could and probably should have scored more, Solomon, Aaronson, and sub Mateo Joseph all having further opportunities, although each squandered chance only added to the Stoke fans’ pent-up frustration, meaning they had to wait until the full-time whistle before venting their anger. We’ve all been there, but it’s so much more satisfying when it’s not our team and manager getting booed off the pitch.

We’ll have to wait another few months before discovering whether Leeds truly possess The Right Stuff. The omens are good, though. This time last year, United were fourteen points off leaders Leicester and eight short of Ipswich after losing on Boxing Day. Twelve months on, we’re top of the league, slowly ticking off each challenge as it comes. The same again on Sunday at Derby, and this season will start feeling that bit more Righteous. ⬢

(Photograph by Barrington Coombs, via Alamy)