Could Rodrigo and Robin Koch get a taste of Leeds United chaos at Liverpool asks Daniel Chapman

Anybody who thinks international football has been crushed by the club game should have sweated along with the Nations League fever engulfing Yorkshire over the last week.

Fans watched Germany vs Spain as if it was a major tournament final, or a Leeds game. Although Joachim Löw kept Robin Koch on the bench for most of it, away from record signing Rodrigo, when Koch did get on for the last few minutes, his problem was he couldn’t get close enough. Our new striker’s last-minute assist was cheered in Leeds as much as the equalising goal was in Spain.

Kalvin Phillips was on the bench for England’s match in Iceland, but if anyone has brought poetry back to the national team, it’s him: from his story about screaming in his car after Gareth Southgate phoned him with the news, to his family regaling Calendar with their stories of Kalvin giving them the news, to the big proud grin he’s been wearing as snugly as his new England shirt.

That shirt is going to Marcelo Bielsa, a gift in return for the one Bielsa gave Phillips to commemorate his call-up, and that’s another sweet notion for the collection.

The game with Iceland was dour stuff, so it was more fun to imagine what Kalvin was thinking. First, that he could do anything he was seeing on the pitch, just as good and twice as fast.

Second, about the note he was going to write to the boss, the exchange of coy smiles when the shirt is handed over.

It’s all just so bloomin’ lovely you could weep, and not at all what we’ve learned to associate with elite football’s Machiavellian tendencies.

Leeds will smash themselves into the elite at the end of this week, into Liverpool at Anfield: not a reserve Liverpool team in an early round of the League Cup, but the proper Liverpool, the one that won the Premier League last season, the Champions League the season before that. United can’t go there with romance as their only weapon but, if ever there was a season for a bit of old-school joy, this is it.

Even more than Project Restart, the new season is offering hope of life post-pandemic. Strangely, uncertainly and imperfectly, we can look forward to being inside a football ground again.

Then there’s the weight of promotion that Leeds now carry as lightly as a plume of peacock feathers. Every new season of the last 16 began with stressful demands for going up but we are, at last, beginning Hockaday and Cellino’s awesome adventure to the Champions League, and it no longer feels like a bogus joke.

And last, the schedule, that Stuart Dallas bemoaned last week. The Nations League matches that made us happy have infuriated players and coaches, as already short pre-seasons disappeared in a haze of travel.

Instead of absorbing Bielsa’s lessons on handling Liverpool and getting match sharpness with Leeds, Phillips was sitting watching England playing to a Southgate script.

He’ll need some swift deprogramming when he gets back to Thorp Arch, if there’s time.

It’s a problem for coaches but brings back elements of the old-school game.

The sometimes draining tactical emphasis at the top levels is a consequence of near-universal fitness: we’re not watching machines playing, but it’s close and, if bodies are matched physically, tactical preparation becomes the differentiator. We’re watching coaches’ plans, not players’ ingenuity.

In some ways this has made the game better, but there’s always room for change. Players for both teams this weekend will be straight from the airport to Anfield. If Rodrigo and Koch play it will be after a handful of training sessions with team-mates they’ve barely met.

It’s a different test and an intriguing one. With just a word or two from the coach, can you play? With jetlag and fatigue, can you fight? With new players by your side, can you win?

Sometimes I look through old fixture lists and yearn for a taste of that chaos. Take the end of 1956/57, John Charles’ last league games after he’d agreed to move to Juventus.

His new club watched their new star playing away at Sunderland, then away the next day at Birmingham, then one day off before Sunderland at home. No substitutes, either, just 11 footballers playing games.

Some ills of recent football could be seen in the Nations League matches: pedestrian pace, tactical cancellation, long waits for incident. Chucking the players out on the park like it’s the 1950s might not be progressive, but it might shake things up a bit.

And there in the mayhem will be Leeds United FC, with a coach whose tactics are the simplest around: attack.