Leeds United opened up the second half of the 2018/19 campaign with a Championship trip to Nottingham Forest earlier today.
Heading to the City Ground looking to bounce back to winning ways following defeat to Hull City in the last game, the hosts took a quick lead in the fifth minute of the game but it seemed it was only a matter of time before manager Marcelo Bielsa’s side got themselves back into it.
For a period we did. After being reduced to ten men with Kalvin Phillips seeing a straight red card just prior to the halftime break, we started brightly again and Jack Clarke got us back on level terms with Ezgjan Alioski giving us a 2-1 advantage in the 64th minute.
Forest replied strongly at that stage though and our efforts were undone as they scored three times to take a 4-2 win come the fulltime whistle.
💬 | "We need to stand up and be counted" Get more post-match reaction from Barry, Carlos and Marcelo on the #LUFC app now pic.twitter.com/DywRrKZTLk
— Leeds United (@LUFC) January 1, 2019
Speaking to the BBC following the game, our gaffer explained.
“We didn’t lose the control of the game. I would say the opposite, that we could control the game even if we had one player less. We had a succession of facts and all of these facts were against us. We had to play with one player less. We were a little bit fragile in defence but during the 90 minutes we did everything to win. The players did a very big effort. It’s not a new fact that we have problems on set-pieces and it’s also not a new fact that we make it easier sometimes for the opponent to have chances to score. But the game has these kind of risks and the fact that we dared to play, sometimes it has negative aspects like today but it also gave us a style of play that we should be faithful to.”