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Sunderland departed West Yorkshire 13 months ago on a snowy February night with their hopes of automatic promotion from the Championship seemingly in tatters.

Leeds had come from behind to clinch a 95th-minute victory that took them top of the second tier and only the most optimistic visiting fans expected a rematch this season.

Fast-forward to a balmy March evening though and Régis Le Bris’s well executed game-plan lifted Sunderland to the 40-point mark and 11th place in the Premier League. Who, last February, could seriously have imagined that the eventual playoff winners would be four places and nine points ahead of Daniel Farke’s team today?

An injury-hit Sunderland arrived very much in containment mode. Le Bris’s players duly devoted the first half to protecting their debutant goalkeeper, Melker Ellborg, and frustrating Leeds fans in equal measure.

The 22-year-old Ellborg, a £3m, 22-year-old, arrival from Malmö in January, was deputising for the hamstrung Robin Roefs. His teammates happily ceded plenty of possession to Leeds but their off the ball positioning was so suffocating that bar expertly turning an Anton Stach free-kick around a post, Mellborg had relatively little to do.

Enzo Le Fée is Sunderland’s brightest creative talent but, with the left sided midfielder’s evening spent largely in industrious tracking-back mode rather than picking defence bisecting passes, the Leeds goalkeeper, Karl Darlow, was even less involved than his Swedish counterpart.

When Ellborg collapsed, clutching a hamstring, following a fairly innocuous looking collision with Dominic Calvert-Lewin and required lengthy treatment, Elland Road regulars became seriously annoyed. With the visiting players taking drinks and clustering around Le Bris their boos – not to mention chants of “What the fuck is going on” – suggested that time-wasting was suspected.

Like Farke, Sunderland’s manager had arranged his side in a 3-4-2-1 formation. With the excellent Dan Ballard directing operations from the heart of the back three, Calvert-Lewin’s hopes of recapturing his free scoring form of a few weeks ago were stymied.

It speaks volumes that one of the highlights of the opening half involved home substitute, Sean Longstaff, attempting to steal the ball-boys’ towel in order to prevent Luke O’Nien – recalled to Sunderland’s defence where he performed well alongside Ballard and Omar Alderete – from drying the ball before launching a long throw. A comedic standoff concluded with Longstaff receiving a telling-off but no booking.

Le Bris’s tactics were forcing Leeds to play far too directly for their own good and it left the game largely devoid of aesthetically pleasing passing sequences.

Ten minutes into the second half though, Sunderland altered course. On came their captain Granit Xhaka and the arrival of a player who serves as the team’s equivalent of an air traffic control tower in central midfield prompted a switch to a back four.

Xhaka is still working his way back to full fitness following an ankle injury but his arrival prompted a slightly more attacking visiting approach.

Not to be outdone, Farke introduced a second striker in Lukas Nmecha and, shortly afterwards, Leeds thought they had taken the lead.

Perhaps inevitably, that ultimately disallowed effort came from a set-piece and featured Stach’s free-kick being headed beyond a wrong-footed Mellberg and in off the bar by Joe Rodon. Unfortunately for Farke, though, a VAR intervention determined Rodon was around a yard offside and it did not stand.

Instead Sunderland soon won a penalty when Ethan Ampadu was adjudged to have blocked Wilson Isidor’s shot with his arm. Given that the ball deflected off Ampadu’s knee Leeds fans felt it was harsh but a VAR review and a trip to his pitchside monitor helped the referee, Stuart Attwell, decide the midfielder had guided the ball to safety.

Up stepped Habib Diarra and although Darlow touched the Senegal midfielder’s spot-kick, he could not hold it and, as Sunderland raced to celebrate in front of their fans, the rest of Elland Road chorused “1-0 to the referee.”