Phil Hay column: Why Leeds United must focus on promotion aim and not Sheffield United's Elland Road celebrations

Grayson made that remark after Leeds United beat Queens Park Rangers before Christmas in 2010, a game which feels evermore like a different era as the years go by.

Second hosted first that day and second won, which caused some merriment in the tunnel afterwards. Neil Warnock, QPR’s manager, had words with Grayson’s players and had words in his press conference afterwards.

“They’ve not won promotion yet,” he said. “With those celebrations you’d think they were already there.”

QPR took the Championship title four months later and Leeds tailed off into seventh place when it mattered so he might think that his comments were justified but it suits the wounded side on an afternoon like that to downplay the result.

It was Warnock who had dispensed with his lucky shorts after QPR’s first defeat of the season a week earlier and Warnock who called his centre-backs “amateurs” after that loss.

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The fixture at Elland Road was big enough and his only pleasure at the end of it was a phone call to tell him he’d become a grandfather.

There were echoes of that fuss in Patrick Bamford’s comments when he spoke after Saturday’s derby with Sheffield United, a game which the Championship and parts of Yorkshire stopped for.

The extent to which it mattered was shown at every turn: Elland Road’s biggest attendance for almost 10 years, Dean Henderson goading the Kop at full-time and forcing Billy Sharp to restrain an agitated Pablo Hernandez, Pontus Jansson in the goalkeeper’s shirt hobbling up for the last corner of the match and Chris Wilder pushing one of Sky’s cameramen away from his dug-out as he counted down the minutes of injury-time.

Marcelo Bielsa felt the significance too, in the considered way that Bielsa processes emotion, and said what everyone in the ground was thinking at full-time.

“It’s an important game and we lost it,” he said. “I don’t want to underestimate the victory of the opponent.”

Bamford’s feeling was that Sheffield United’s reaction after the final whistle over-estimated the value of it.

“Hearing them (the away fans) and hearing the Sheffield United boys, it was as if they already think they’re up,” he said. “It’s eight games to go and there’s still a lot of points to play for. Nothing’s written in stone yet.”

It was a quote from Warnock’s playbook, albeit at a later stage of the season: come back to us when the music stops.

In isolation, it is a fair comment.

Wilder has taken Sheffield United’s players to Spain for part of the international break and Bielsa gave his squad the first half of this week off with a view to working them to the bone when they report back in tomorrow but both coaches can see that the initiative gained and lost last Saturday has a potentially limited timespan.

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There is no likelihood of either club winning all eight of their remaining fixtures and no suggestion on Wilder’s part that Sheffield United are as good as up. Norwich City are making their play for the title, and making it convincingly, but second place is teed up to be decided at the finishing tape.

The problem with Bamford’s remarks was that Sheffield United edged a derby which Leeds themselves talked up. Pontus Jansson called it “the biggest game of our lives” and asked the crowd to pack into Elland Road before the warm-up (although driving rain intervened with that).

Mateusz Klich said it was “one of the most important games for me and everyone else in the dressing room” and it could not be said that the picture of a pivotal, defining match was painted merely by those observing it.

The game mattered that much beforehand and, on that basis, it mattered that much when Chris Basham settled it. It is too late in the term to pay heed to anything other than the scoreline.

Leeds should not feel motivated by Sheffield United’s celebrations but by the thought of how it will feel on the season’s decisive day if celebrations like that are carrying on elsewhere.

Warnock got angry in 2010 but got even before long and got QPR promoted, and any commentary on Sheffield United’s exuberance is a deflection from the pressure Leeds are under and the short sprint they are in.

One thing Saturday proved is that talk is cheap.