The Yorkshire Evening Post’s Lee Sobot reflects on a damaging afternoon for Leeds United as they fell to a one-nil defeat at Elland Road to Blackburn Rovers.
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00:00 A Northern Road where we have just seen a first league defeat of the season for Daniel
00:07 Fark's side as they fell to a 1-0 loss against Blackburn Rovers and no other way of putting
00:13 it other than a huge opportunity blown. Again for the Whites on the back of a really good
00:19 result for them on Friday night in terms of Leicester City falling to defeat at Plymouth
00:23 Argyle and basically here they've blown up the chance to not just go top but to have
00:28 gone into the automatic promotion places and really you've got to ask now quite what will
00:33 happen with this season. There's every chance they still might finish top two. There's definite
00:39 chances of that no matter what happens in terms of the results between when Leeds finish
00:43 off here and when they play next against Middlesbrough. There'll be a long gap to that one on Monday
00:48 night but if they keep on with these results that are going at the moment then they definitely
00:53 won't be going up and if this theme continues of just struggling to create really and just
00:58 an extremely, extremely disappointing afternoon here and this is a defeat remember against
01:02 the side in Blackburn Rovers who were thumped 5-0 in midweek at Bristol City who were fighting
01:08 relegation and you know obviously was extremely lot of disappointment when Leeds were held
01:13 to a goalless draw against Sunderland in midweek. Lee then detailed just what went wrong for
01:18 Leeds in the match. And that's only got worse here with the 1-0 defeat against Blackburn
01:23 and no surprise who got the only goal of the goal, Sammy Smoddicks, the league's top scorer.
01:27 He had a bit of a frustrating first half. He looked quite fired up and angry that Blackburn
01:30 weren't really getting up the pitch but he was much better in the second half and with
01:34 82 minutes on the clock Leeds were dominating and pushing forward but you sort of expected
01:38 that but basically a route one goal but a very neat goal nevertheless. Ball flicked
01:42 on, second ball through to Smoddicks and once he was one-on-one with Melie, the championship's
01:46 top scorer was not going to miss and applied a neat finish and that was that. Leeds tried
01:50 to rally, there was added time. There still wasn't enough added time really especially
01:54 in the first half one minute when you think about how much time Blackburn wasted in terms
01:58 of taking ages with everything but you can't blame that. The referee wasn't great either.
02:03 Leeds felt they should have had a penalty at the end when Patrick Bamford went down
02:05 in the box and they did look to be potentially something in that but ultimately they just
02:09 ran out of ideas here and an awful lot of shots and attempts at goal. I think it was
02:13 18 attempts, an awful lot of possession as you would expect but not really a sort of
02:17 game where you sort of thought how did he miss that, how did he miss that, how did he
02:20 miss that. There were just lots of decent enough chances. I mean, they did come close.
02:25 Dan James flashed one across goal when Nanto went into the post to try and finish from
02:28 close range. There was a good chance for Emilia Gruev in the first half when he put the ball
02:32 wide from a Nanto cutback. Nanto was excellent in taking off. I think everybody was scratching
02:37 their head at that but basically Daniel Farke said he was just coming back from injury and
02:40 you can tell that and the substitutions will be questioned. Everything will be questioned
02:45 because Leeds have fallen to a 1-0 defeat. Really nice moment at half-time when everybody
02:49 paid tribute to Stuart Dallas. The score was goalless at that time. I think everybody
02:53 still hoped that Gordon would win the game but they didn't. They've fallen to a 1-0
02:56 defeat and plenty of questions to answer now.
02:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]