Norwich City maintained their brilliant season start under David Wagner, Leeds United’s attack looks ominous and Mads Frokjaer-Jensen is making a name for himself at Preston. All this and more from the latest round of the Championship…
TEAM OF THE ROUND
Norwich City
The perception of Norwich for a decade or more is that of a club who knows exactly what they’re doing in the Championship, but then struggles to cope when they get to the Premier League. Put the Premier League bit aside and we’ve seen Norwich dominate at second tier level, with four promotions in their last seven Championship seasons. When it looked as though they’d settle into the Championship for a sustained period back in 2018, Norwich miraculously jumped from 13th to 1st with the team of Emi Buendia and Teemu Pukki taking the league by storm.
I’m getting a weirdly similar feeling about Norwich right now. Last season was poor, manager Dean Smith was fired as manager, sporting director Stuart Webber is currently working his notice and the Canaries are going into their final year of parachute payments. The mood wasn’t good going into week one, but David Wagner’s side has started the season brilliantly with the latest 4-0 victory over Huddersfield cementing Norwich as one of the early pace setters.
The experienced faces they’ve added have settled in as quickly as you’d expect them to alongside existing talents like Gabriel Sara and young sensation Jonathon Rowe. Norwich have an uncanny knack of making it count when they get even the slightest sniff of Championship promotion, could they be about to do it all over again?
PLAYER OF THE ROUND
Mads Frokjaer-Jensen (Preston North End)
It’s very easy to fall into the slightly undesirable trap of becoming a football hipster these days. They’ve been around in music and fashion for years but with the level of information and analysis of the game deeper than it has ever been the football hipster is a growing phenomenon. The key component of being a football hipster is the absolute imperative that your views and ideologies are progressive to the point that they’re ahead of the ‘average fan’. By the time the ‘average fan’ has caught on to a team, player or trend mentioned in hipster circles, the hipster must have quickly exited that sphere of conversation and moved decisively on to the next trend.
If you want to catch a trend, an absolutely perfect case study would be Mads Frokjaer-Jensen of Preston. He’s just perfect isn’t he? An exotic sounding double barrelled name from Denmark, a nation small enough not to be considered too mainstream and playing for Preston, a club similarly fringe enough to be completely fashionably unfashionable.
He also plays in the most progressive of positions just off the frontman, so you could use the numbers 10 or 8, talk about half spaces and measure his creative output in xA. Sarcasm aside, Frokjaer-Jensen has already banged out a goal and two assists in the opening weeks during Preston’s impressive start, and he set up the winner for Duane Holmes in Saturday’s 2-1 win over Swansea. He looks like a really fun player to watch this season, but of course if I were a true football hipster I’d have told you all this eighteen months ago!
TALKING POINT OF THE ROUND
Leeds New Look
At 2.12pm on Saturday I tweeted the following. ‘Ok then. That front four could be problematic, godspeed’. The context being that I was in the pub in Ipswich and had just laid eyes on the Leeds United team who would be starting at Portman Road in 48 minutes time. It doesn’t happen too frequently so forgive me for enjoying saying that I was absolutely right, in fact I’d probably say that ‘problematic’ was an understatement given what I witnessed from the Leeds front four.
The four players in question are club record signing Georginio Rutter, previously ‘missing in action’ stars Will Gnonto and Luis Sinisterra, and new statement signing Joel Piroe. The four of them started together for the first time, Leeds won 4-3 and the quartet scored a goal each in an impressive attacking debut. Of course it’s only a single game but what I saw with my own two eyes does throw up an intriguing what if scenario.
What if these four players stay at Leeds for the entirety of this season and with a bit of luck with availability are able play the majority of games? I think we all know the answer don’t we and what’s more worrying to Championship defences is the additional presence of Bamford, James and Summerville to potentially add to that mix. Things can change fast, players get sold, players get injured and go in and out of form, but Leeds firepower in the right structure is looking pretty formidable.
LOANEE OF THE ROUND
Jay Stansfield (Birmingham on loan from Fulham)
It’s not a very difficult decision for this week’s star loanee. Jay Stansfield was announced as having arrived at Birmingham on Thursday and very much on brand I was literally on a podcast discussing Blues striking options when word got out. The general thought was that Birmingham needed a bit more depth in the attacking roster and this move seemed to make a lot of sense for all parties. Birmingham get themselves a striker and Fulham get to see a player develop further after a pretty decent stint in League 1 with Exeter City last season.
Birmingham started with Scott Hogan as their sole striker in the home game against Plymouth on Saturday and Hogan scored the opening goal to give them the lead. Plymouth equalised on the hour mark and two minutes later Stansfield entered the game replacing right sided attacker Jordan James. In a perfect debut narrative with the clock up to 95 minutes Stansfield powered to the edge of the box, moved the bouncing ball away from his marker into his path and absolutely leathered into the net for the winning goal.
St Andrews feels like a place where everything is going right at the moment and maybe Stansfield was able to capitalise on a great moment for Blues. A good loan will always benefit all parties though and this one is already looking like ticking those boxes.
Follow Benjamin Bloom on Twitter @BenjaminBloom
The Benjamin Bloom Football Channel – www.youtube.com/benjaminbloom
