Leeds United’s Ezgjan Alioski has raged about their last-gasp penalty shout against Preston – but the thing is, it wasn’t a penalty.
North End hosted Leeds last night, looking to get back on track against Marcelo Bielsa’s men. Alex Neil’s side battled well at Deepdale, and opened the scoring on the counter as Tom Barkhuizen tapped home Seani Maguire’s pass.
That gave North End around 15-20 minutes to hold on, but fell near the end as Eddie Nketiah’s headed in an 87th minute leveller for Leeds. A draw was possibly a fair result, but Leeds felt aggrieved at the end.
As a last minute cross came to Tyler Roberts, Ben Pearson made a risky lunge inside the box. Down went Roberts, everyone connected with Leeds went up for a penalty, but Kevin Friend waved play on.
Even after the final whistle, Friend was having to usher Leeds players away from him, with players incensed that no penalty was given.
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Left back Alioski spoke to Leeds Live after the final whistle, claiming it was ‘unbelievable’ that Friend didn’t give the penalty. Alioski can’t believe that the referee and the linesmen didn’t award the penalty, and feels that referees need to know that opposition players foul Leeds players to cope with their high-intensity play.
“I’ve said this before,” said Alioski. “We fight against the team that we play and against the referees. It’s unbelievable that the referees don’t help us sometimes, because it’s a clear penalty. It’s unbelievable how they don’t see it. There’s four referees on the pitch and nobody sees it. We can’t say it’s the referees, but what we need is that they know that we play high-intensity, and sometimes the other teams need to do fouls and they need to help us,” he added.
That’s all well and good, but the thing is… it wasn’t a penalty. Perfect footage from Leeds fan @dommer12 on Twitter shows that Pearson got the ball in ahead of Roberts. His foot clears the ball before he even touches Roberts, and whilst there’s a subsequent coming together, there was no foul.
Preston fans have been critical of referee Friend over the years, most likely because of his farcical sending off of Billy Jones at Burnley way back in 2010. However, credit where credit is due – he got this decision absolutely spot on, when he could easily have got it wrong.