Leeds United and Norwich City top the bill and the table as two Championship heavyweights prepare to meet

Sky teed it up for a live broadcast and, on Saturday night, it will be the only show in town.

“I think all of Leeds is waiting for it,” Mateusz Klich said.

Hype around fixtures so pivotal can kill them dead but Leeds United and Norwich have been serving up spectacles all season and nothing in the way the teams think and play points to anything other than a hell-for-leather evening.

It will decide nothing but could dictate so much in a league where one patch of form might decisively tip the balance.

Norwich have been in form ever since Leeds travelled to Carrow Road and toyed with them for 90 minutes in August. Two losses in 24 subsequent games, set against 14 wins, have given Daniel Farke’s tenure sudden direction and it is a mark of Leeds’ impetus under Marcelo Bielsa that Norwich sit a place and three points behind the Championship’s leaders. The gaps between the teams are marginal in every respect.

Farke was complimentary about Leeds after Bielsa’s players trounced his own at Carrow Road, describing United as “100 per cent the best team in the league”.

Bielsa would speak in reciprocal terms and he did not class United’s 3-0 win in Norwich as a cakewalk.

“When we won, they had more chances to score than us,” he said. “When you see the result you see a huge difference but when you look at both performances, you see there is not much difference. Norwich have a creative profile.”

For Leeds, a victory on Saturday would come with the guarantee of a six-point lead at the top of the division; more daylight than the club have had behind them at any stage.

Bielsa knows what type of game is coming. Norwich’s goalscoring is on a par with West Bromwich Albion’s, the most prolific team in the league, and they are the only side to have scored more often from open play than Leeds. Bielsa’s mantra of playing to win is mirrored by Farke’s.

Twenty-one of City’s goals have come in the last 15 minutes of matches, a tally worth more than 20 points.

Leeds, though, hold the initiative on merit, with the division’s strongest home record and the best on the road after their 2-1 win at Rotherham United on Saturday.

The result, earned by a second-half brace from Klich, was a healthy precursor to a top-of-the-table fixture for which every seat has been bought.

Elsewhere at the weekend, Norwich took some of their own medicine as Billy Sharp’s 79th-minute effort earned Sheffield United a 2-2 draw at Carrow Road.

Klich made no attempt to play down the significance of Saturday’s match, or the entertainment it might deliver.

“We can’t wait for the game,” the midfielder said.

“It’s going to be a very nice game to watch. We’re going to do everything to win it and make the gap at the top even bigger because that’s what we need to do right now.

“It’s not only us. I think all Leeds is already waiting for it.”

The weekend promised to be all-consuming enough without the backdrop of another equally tense skirmish.

Norwich were not the direct victims of ‘Spygate’, the scouting controversy which has been stalking Leeds and Bielsa for three weeks, but it was City who instigated the collective letter sent by 11 Championship sides to the EFL demanding a full inquiry into Bielsa’s admission that he regularly ordered members of his staff to watch opposition sides train.

Leeds have tried to push the dispute to one side, without great success.

Bielsa was asked at the end of Saturday’s win over Rotherham whether he thought many of those observing the ‘Spygate’ fall-out were now willing United’s season to fall apart and the subject was raised with Norwich defender Christoph Zimmermann after City’s 2-2 draw with Sheffield United. Every opinion has been canvassed.

Bielsa, who is under investigation by the EFL and the Football Association, has halted his practice of observing rival clubs’ training sessions after accepting criticism of it.

Zimmermann, though, said it would not have worried him had United’s head coach dispatched staff to Norwich before Saturday’s game.

“I think everyone has heard about that story,” the German said.

“We’re not really afraid of anything and certainly not of someone spying on a training session. You see that teams analyse the other teams and that’s also what we’re doing. Probably not spying but the way they play in recent weeks.

“We’ll be prepared for them and I’m sure they’ll do their homework and be prepared for us. Then it’s just about which side performs better.”

That was ultimately true of Derby County’s 2-0 defeat at Elland Road on January 11, 24 hours after ‘Spygate’ blew up when one of Bielsa’s interns was stopped by police outside Derby’s training ground.

County’s anger was very public but their manager, Frank Lampard, was forced to concede that his side had been thoroughly outclassed by Leeds. It was, by full-time, a mismatch between two top-six clubs.

Leeds’ defeat of Norwich in August felt equally one-sided and Zimmermann admitted that City had a score to settle.

“We do, definitely,” he said. “They showed us our limits in the first game but certainly I think we’ve improved.

“But more important than some kind of revenge is that it’s an important game.”