Sheffield United demonstrate difference in quality to see off Millwall at the Den

It has been a dish eaten cold, but Chris Wilder got his revenge on the place which marked the lowest point of his tenure at Sheffield United. Four games after taking over, he watched his team lose at the Den to sink to the bottom of League One. On the way home, he stopped the coach at Bermondsey shopping centre and stocked up on lager. Since then, his team has been on an unbroken upward trajectory.

And the gap that now has grown between the two clubs was demonstrated here. The visitors won it with two strikes of the kind of quality indicative of their current position in the Premier League.

Both managers - with league matters in mind - made five changes to their teams. Gary Rowett, due to face Leeds on Wednesday as he tries to steer Millwall towards the Championship play-offs, while Wilder has made no secret of his priorities.

And maybe it was the unfamiliarity of the line ups, but the first half offered no hint this was destined to be a classic. The pitch, rutted, bare and undermined by drainage issues, was not exactly conducive to progressive football. To avoid the divots, both sides aimed to keep the ball in the air, trading hoofs and headers.

For nearly an hour, there were only a couple of moments to warm the cockles. To the home crowd’s great encouragement Aiden O’Brien span away from a statuesque Phil Jagielka and headed towards goal. But Dean Henderson easily saved his shot. Billy Sharp then shot well over and Ollie Norwood sent a freekick straight out into touch before Chris Basham cutely sent through Sharp in on the home keeper Bartosz Bialkowski. The Sheffield captain seemed to have gone too far in his attempt to find an angle, but his shot was true. However Millwall’s James Brown got up offa his thing and cleared.

Rather magnificently, the worse the game got, the louder the two sets of supporters became. As the visitors from Yorkshire sang about chip butties, Millwall’s insistence that noone likes them but they don’t care rattled the ribcage. But despite the increasing crescendo, Sheffield gradually began to exercise control. The crosses started to come in, the ball was switched at pace, the Premier League side moved into the ascendant.

There was something inevitable about what happened next. Jagielka neatly closed down a Millwall attack and, in the pattern of the game, cleared long. Callum Robinson passed it further forward to Sharp who did brilliantly not only to hold, control and then play the ball to Mo Besic, but to make a dummy run which suddenly opened up the space for his colleague. Besic duly launched a fizzing left foot shot from outside the area beyond the Millwall keeper. It was a goal whose quality was somewhat at odds with what had gone before. And Sharp demonstrated that it was no one-off, With the game fading into inevitability, his laid a gilt edged invitation of a pass to Oliver Norwood who duly accepted the chance to fire home. Wilder, a man never afraid to roll up his sleeves and see his team scrap, will have enjoyed that.