Phil Hay's Column: The season is reaching the sharp end. Can Izzy Brown find a way to show why Leeds United signed him?

Three of that crowd were sent to Leeds United in the summer window, only to enact a scaled-down rerun of And Then There Were None. Jamal Blackman broke a leg in November and was last pictured in Leeds on a bed in the post-surgery ward of the LGI. Lewis Baker lasted longer but was a red flag to Chelsea’s loan department: hardly playing, underwhelming when he did and, irrespective of Marcelo Bielsa’s opinion of him, better off elsewhere. A January-break clause was activated three weeks ago.

Which leaves Izzy Brown as the last man standing, if that is the appropriate phrase after a year lost to a surgery on a torn ACL. That a successful operation (Brown underwent a second later, to clear out excess tissue) can leave an athlete grasping for fitness 12 months later explains why ACL injuries once ended careers as a matter of course and much as it is easy to say when someone else is on the treadmill of rehabilitation, modern science is a reason for footballers to count their blessings.

Leeds’ rationale for taking Brown on loan, knowing as they did that he would contribute nothing to the first half of the season, was two-fold: they saw talent there, already showcased in the Championship with a team who won the play-offs in 2017, and Chelsea were happy to bear his full wage for as long as the medical department at Thorp Arch were managing his health. Leeds paid nothing for Brown for many weeks but they are paying for him now and it was at this point of the season where they thought the sense of the transfer would shine through: with Brown, at the very least, on the bench and in Marcelo Bielsa’s eyeline. Contributing in one way or another.

He is contributing to the Under-23s, and another goal against Sheffield United on Monday kept the development squad at the top of their league, but Brown is stuck in the routine he left behind at Chelsea when a trademark sequence of loans began with Vitesse Arnhem. For a large core of Chelsea’s academy, the choice in front of them is junior football at Stamford Bridge or senior football somewhere else. The distribution of prospects creates a supply of saleable assets and the resistance amongst Chelsea’s hierarchy to losing Callum Hudson-Odoi to Bayern Munich does not change the fact that they cash in on the fruits of their academy when it suits. Patrick Bamford raised £6m without playing for Chelsea once.

Where Brown is going in the longer term is less worthy of consideration than where he is going now. He pulled a hamstring in December – a natural byproduct of so much time without kicking a ball – but has been fit for the past few weeks and doing what the simple observer would expect him to do in Leeds’ development squad. From Bielsa’s viewpoint, it has not quite been enough. “He just needs to do a little bit more in the games,” said Leeds’ head of medicine and performance Rob Price last week, “to let the manager see what he’s able to do, before he’s involved.”

Bielsa has never downplayed the severity of the knee injury behind Brown, or the implications of it for a player whose position requires mobility, core strength and quick changes of movement. Bielsa never makes much secret either of the fact that high-intensity running is the basis of everything he preaches as a coach. With his bench so deprived of players with track records, it could be argued that Brown, at any level of match fitness, would be a better alternative to no Brown at all. Yet no Brown at all was Bielsa’s preference away at Rotherham, a game where a change from the bench was crucial.

Bielsa found it through Tyler Roberts and United’s head coach is seemingly capable of finding a path through any perceived crisis, with players who other coaches would turn to only under duress. It stood to reason that he would need Brown at some stage, to replenish his team when the strain of the season began to bite, but Bielsa has navigated two frugal transfer windows and the worst spate of injuries he can ever have seen while confounding the fear that it would, surely, cost him eventually. The call for the signing of a centre-back was ringing around him as far back as August but here he is at the start of February with the chance on Saturday to drive Leeds six points clear of the rest of the Championship, and with no new centre-back in sight. Life under Bielsa revises a lot of what you thought you knew.

The signing of Brown will go one of three ways now: paying off latterly with an injection of influence, rendered immaterial by the fact that Leeds win promotion anyway or left to be criticised by a season which drops off without any of the impact the club believed he would have. He was advertised as a slow burn but the Championship’s fuse is a long way gone and he is contributing to a weird statistic which shows that three Chelsea loanees have so far made one more league start between them this season than Will Huffer, the academy goalkeeper who left for a month of rough-and-ready football with Barnet last week. Brown, as a promotion winner with Huddersfield, does not need to explain why Leeds’ were interested in him. With time flying by it is less about what he can do than when of if he will be able to do it. Now or never.