LEEDS, England - You could have forgiven Roberto De Zerbi if he had burst through the door of the Elland Road media suite, howling about officiating injustice and hinting at conspiracy.
It's a tactic employed by plenty of his peers after a troubling defeat, such as this one was for Tottenham Hotspur in West Yorkshire. Instead, the Italian solemnly walked through the side door and sat to patiently field questions. There was no wide-eyed outburst to clip up, no raging against the dying of the light. Saturday's match was decided by Noah Okafor's 79th-minute strike past Antonín Kinsky, 97 seconds after his introduction off the bench, but it hinged on referee John Brooks and VAR Tony Harrington deciding against sending off Jayden Bogle after half an hour.
"I can't say something more because I didn't see clearly the situation," De Zerbi said as he went on to express "surprise" at the decision but not much more, focusing instead on his own team's shortcomings.
He added to TNT Sports: "I have big confidence in the referee. Nothing changes if he goes to the monitor. If they didn't take the right decision, I don't know. We have to keep the eyes on the performance where we can improve."
Bogle's coming together with Mathys Tel in front of the dugouts was unusual in that it was his left foot which made contact with the Spurs winger's ankle while he tried to get in position to make a tackle with his right. It's the sort of incident that is framed by different verbs, depending on your allegiance. Those of a Leeds persuasion would temper emotions with words like 'clumsy' and 'accidental.' While Spurs' fanbase would describe it as 'ugly' and 'dangerous.'
Spurs midfielder Xavi Simons put himself firmly in the latter camp on Saturday evening as he went on Instagram to compare the Bogle-Tel incident with the red card he was shown against Liverpool last season for an admittedly similar offence. Leeds boss Daniel Farke was perhaps over-wrought in the defence of his player as he described Bogle as "a butterfly" and "probably the softest player in the whole league," surely creating a new nickname for the defender within the Leeds dressing room in the process.
Whatever the correct interpretation of the incident, after the officials had sided with Leeds' version of events, pointing to "a lack of speed going into the challenge", this match proved unwinnable for De Zerbi's men.
- Leeds 1-0 Tottenham: Okafor strike ends Spurs, De Zerbi's winning run
- De Zerbi questions Leeds-Spurs refereeing, Farke says Bogle 'my butterfly'
Elland Road had been sleepy during the tepid opening exchanges of this Saturday lunchtime kick-off with the Leeds fans roused only momentarily by a VAR check for a possible handball in the box by Mateus Fernandes. The Bogle-Tel collision that followed gave them a moment of perceived injustice to rail against as they lambasted the Frenchman for what they felt was an example of a visiting player making too much out of an innocuous tackle. Replays, though, indicated their anger against Tel was misjudged, and the sight of him later limping down the tunnel proved it was misplaced. However, the validity of their complaint was ultimately irrelevant. It energised the Leeds fans and the spiky atmosphere that followed turned the game into the sort of contest that only benefitted the hosts. Obscured by the talk of Leeds' five-game winless run in the build-up to this game was the fact Farke's team are in the middle of the club's longest unbeaten run at home in the Premier League since 2001 -- which now stands at nine matches.
"Overall it's the best league in the world and you can win and lose some momentum pretty quickly," Farke told reporters. "We have not done too much wrong in the past weeks with just a very difficult spell of difficult away games... All of a sudden you have a few games in a row where you don't have the winning feeling and it is always difficult to win the momentum back.
"And then the first win, it's not like you go out and play the opponent off the park. You have to earn it and you have to work for it and that is what we did today."
De Zerbi's attempts to inject some momentum into his team had no impact on proceedings, but it took Okafor less than two minutes to score the Leeds winner after he was sent on by Farke. Spurs are now winless in their last 51 matches after conceding the first goal and so the die was possibly cast as soon as they went behind. Asked about his team's second-half performance, De Zerbi said he was "surprised because my players worked very well this week."
"We spoke all week, all days about the intensity, about the type of game we would find in the stadium, the atmosphere we would find in the stadium. So it was not a surprise for us," he added.
"Sometimes it can happen. You are prepared for that game, that type of game. You know everything, but at the end we didn't play like we wanted before the game."