Sleeping pills, aggression, 'I'm not dead' message behind Farke's Leeds United dressing room talk — Leeds Live 3/12/23
Leeds United beat Middlesbrough 3-2 at Elland Road in the Championship on Saturday and Daniel Farke has opened up on how much he enjoyed the chaos of the first half
Excitable, emotional, aggressive and playing risky passes.
This is how Daniel Farke loves his Leeds United team, not doubling as a
sedative with the spectator nodding off. In other words, Saturday’s first half
had his heart pumping.
A frenetic and frantic 45 minutes saw five goals scored with
three of those in the opening seven minutes, punishing anyone held up by
traffic coming into Elland Road. It was an end-to-end, open, loose game of
football that would have had neutrals out of their seats.
Farke, far from neutral, felt the fire burning inside him
for these 45 minutes too. This was every inch the transitional, basketball kind
of game Elland Road’s regulars came to associate with Marcelo Bielsa’s
thrilling tenure.
The current manager admitted he was heading down the
touchline at half-time with a mixture of happiness and anger with what he had
watched. Leeds were leading, but the goals conceded were too easy for the
visitors, especially the second from a corner.
“It was also important to discipline myself [going into the
half-time team talk] because the fire is still burning, I'm not dead,” said
Farke. “I love football and what we did in our attacking and I can see why we
were driven by our emotion at an excited Elland Road, to play every ball
forward and a risky pass instead of calming it a little bit down.
“We played with too many transition moments on both sides,
but this is a side of my team I love. I love it when we're a bit more
over-excited and over-emotional and over-aggressive, instead of playing
football like sleeping pills.”
The German felt the second half was far more controlled,
though one Middlesbrough counter did have him more than stressed. It was the
attack which led to Pascal Struijk deflecting a shot onto the post before Joe
Rodon managed to block the follow-up shot.
“I love this (the entertaining side), but on the other hand,
it was also important at half-time to speak about details and to calm them a
bit down,” he said. “That our game management would be a bit better and it was,
apart from this one situation (the shot off the post), in the second half. A
hard-fought, but definitely a deserved win.”