Leeds United beat Preston North End 2-1 on Sunday, with a late penalty from Joel Piroe giving the Yorkshire side all three points.
It was a battling display from Preston who did initially take the lead very early on through Liam Millar. Dan James equalised moments after, and in injury time a Ryan Ledson handball led to Leeds grabbing the win from the penalty spot.
Ryan Lowe should learn a lot from the game after his decision to go defensive and sit back for the last quarter of the game, again failing to pay off.
The Leeds players celebrated wildly at the end, as their promotion charge continues. Preston had beaten Leeds with their own late winner just a month earlier, and it was clearly still on a lot of the Leeds’ players minds.
It was a heated game, and you felt Leeds were still annoyed at the red card Illan Meslier received in the fixture at Deepdale. Ultimately he pushed Milutin Osmajic in the face, and regardless of how the striker reacted, that will be a red card 99% of the time.
Unfortunately for The Lilywhites Osmajic wasn’t fit to play in the reverse fixture, but Meslier clearly enjoyed the victory.
Taking to Instagram after the game, Meslier posted a picture of him celebrating with ‘Thanks for coming’ with a waving hand emoji, and also ensuring he had tagged Preston’s official club account on the post.
The French goalkeeper obviously hadn’t got over the fact that his silly dismissal had helped Preston beat Leeds on 26th December.
Perhaps Preston should have targeted the 23-year-old who seems to have a fiery side to him that he needs to control. Most of the heated battles took place in the middle of the park, and despite Meslier conceding straight away, he didn’t have a great deal to do in the rest of the game.
Meslier did post another caption to that photo on Instagram as well.
On Sunday he followed up his previous message with ‘Important win today and also, in the end it’s always the best team that wins.’
There’s no doubting a team with the budget that Leeds have, should be beating a side such as Preston, who’s budget would amount to a small fraction of theirs.
If it’s ‘always the best team that wins’ though, it’s nice to see Meslier admit that Preston were worthy winners on Boxing Day.