It's tight at the top of the Championship - and here's how injury-time magic has kept Leeds United prominent

The division this season has not produce an outrider and the lack of breathing space is so acute that every point will matter down the run-in. Leeds United are hanging in and Marcelo Bielsa has seen the impact results nicked here and there can have on the league table.

United have never scored later than Kalvin Phillips’s equaliser at Middlesbrough earlier this month, a chance taken with 100 minutes on the clock, but there was no less drama around the winners from Kemar Roofe which came twice in the ‘95th minute’ either side of Christmas Day. A volley against Aston Villa on December 23 and a header at home to Blackburn Rovers on Boxing Day turned two points into an improbable haul of six.

Few clubs in the Championship have made better use of stoppage-time than Leeds. Without goals in time added on, Bielsa’s team would be fifth in the table, eight points short of their current tally of 61. Theirs is the biggest difference of any of the sides in contention for promotion, greater that Norwich City’s whose stoppage-time exploits have made headlines of their own. Had every fixture finished on 90 minutes, Norwich would be a point worse off. They and Sheffield United would jointly lead the table on 62 points.

It is a mark of the way Leeds play under Bielsa that they have not been the victims of any stoppage-time strikes themselves. Charlie Mulgrew’s 90th-minute free-kick in the mayhem of United’s Boxing Day victory over Blackburn is their latest concession to date and the impact of it was negated by Roofe. Bielsa has honed his squad physically and tactically to play on the front foot consistently and to persist to the death. It took until the 11th minute of stoppage-time for Leeds to find a way through Middlesbrough’s defence 10 days ago but they had the stamina and the execution needed to earn a 1-1 draw.

Bielsa took a hard line with his squad’s fitness in the summer, asking almost all of them to lose weight and reduce their body fat (Leeds, like most Premier League clubs, aim for a body-fat percentage of 10 per cent or less). United’s head coach was strict about their conditioning, believing high levels of fitness were necessary to allow the club to play possession-based football over the course of the season without blowing themselves out.

The intensity of the training regime, which sometimes involved triple sessions in pre-season, has rarely dropped. Speaking on a Swedish podcast recently, defender Pontus Jansson said: “There’s much more high-intensity training and much more running we do during the week, unlike what we’ve done before.

“Almost always in every workout we do running without ball, high-intensity runs and sprints. We do this almost every day and sometimes the day before the match.

“He (Bielsa) has a philosophy that if you’re tired you should train even harder to make it better. He has that philosophy and won’t change.”

Bielsa, though, said goals like Phillips’s at Middlesbrough were down to more than stamina alone. The 63-year-old insisted that a good level of fitness was only as important as the coaching of the players and the squad’s success in applying his tactics properly in moments of tension.

“It’s not convenient to be overweight but it’s not the only aspect which decides physical performance,” Bielsa said.

“The quality of the training sessions is also important but the professionalism of the players is even more important because to get a good physical performance you need to get the right rest.

“The thing that makes you have a better physical performance is character and personality, and we can add to that natural skill. The second thing is professionalism and the third is the quality of the training sessions."

Goals for and against in stoppage-time has been of negligible consequence to rival teams at the top end of the league. West Bromwich Albion – currently fourth – would be third without it, by virtue of Leeds dropping to fifth, and Middlesbrough would be a single point worse off. The value of Leeds’ equaliser at The Riverside was partly in the point it earned but also in preventing Middlesbrough from closing to within four of United.

Results on Saturday, on a weekend when Leeds had no league fixture, were not kind. Norwich and Sheffield United produced 4-0 wins and West Brom and Middlesbrough both edged difficult away fixtures. The top four are separate by six points and United resume their season at home to Bolton Wanderers on Saturday outside the top two on goal difference. West Brom moved to within a point of second place on Tuesday with a stoppage-time defeat of QPR.

Bielsa gave most of his squad four days off last week, allowing them to catch breath after a 2-1 victory over Swansea City. They resumed training on Monday without top scorer Kemar Roofe who was undergoing scans on a knee ligament injury suffered against Swansea.

The striker saw out the Swansea games but hinted at a problem in a Twitter post the following evening, saying: “Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up.” It remains to be seen if he plays again this season.