Nottingham Forest were the latest to leave Elland Road with nothing after a commanding Leeds United performance.
Nottingham Forest boss Sean Dyche bemoaned his side's defensive basics as they conceded three 'poor' goals to lose at Leeds United.
The Whites went 2-0 up in the first half as Jayden Bogle and Noah Okafor took chances clinically. Bogle ran onto a ball over the top from Ilia Gruev to finish past Stefan Ortega and four minutes later James Justin found Okafor for a simple finish in the area. Leeds' third arrived in the second half to almost kill the game as a contest. Gruev curled the ball towards goal and Dominic Calvert-Lewin chested it into the back of the net for a 3-0 lead. Lorenzo Lucca pulled one back four minutes from time and the visitors huffed and puffed looking for a second in nine minutes of stoppage time before Leeds pulled three points clear of Forest on the final whistle.
Leeds began the game on the front foot, as Dyche told his players they would but the game had become more of an even contest when Leeds took the lead.
"We knew they would start fast, we warned the players about that, how they've gone about their business here," he said. "We did suggest they would do that. The frustrating thing for me, we were having our best spell and it's such a poor goal. We were asking questions of them, Igor [Jesus] has a good chance, we're asking a lot more questions and concede such a poor goal - straight ball over the top, we're trying to play offside, and distances are wrong, covering positions are wrong, and that's very frustrating for me as manager."
Dyche said the loss to injury of centre-back Murillo came too late to work with the team on how the defensive unit would function against Leeds. But what really killed Forest was conceding the second so soon after the first, then the third just four minutes after the break.
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"[The response was alright] it was just the second goal," he said. "You can't concede another poor goal. The game was pretty, pretty even at 1-0 down. They didn't find that edge that they did so early in the game. Two nil down at half-time is not easy in the Premier League. And the third is the one that really kills you, because by then you're looking at it going, okay the biggest challenge is to nick the next goal but you go 2-1 down and all of a sudden everything changes. But we didn't do that. We gave away another really, really poor goal defensively."
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Dyche made no bones about who deserved the victory but felt his side's mentality was an area of positivity even at 3-0 down, because they plugged away to score and might have made it closer still. "I mean, if Morato scores the cross that goes in, if that goes in, we nick a second one with big Luca and then you never know. Could be one of those strange games when you nick something out of it. So I was pleased with the mentality at the end, to keep going. We just can't make basic errors like that, although we didn't have a lot of time to work with the group at the back. But you can't make basic errors like that."
Forest remain six points clear of the drop zone but West Ham United have the opportunity to narrow that gap this weekend. Dyche insists that even had they won to create the nine-point cushion that Leeds now enjoy, he would not be thinking in terms of safety.
"When we got here we were two points into the relegation zone, now we're six points out of it," he said. "I wasn't getting carried away beating Liverpool. The work is still the work. They haven't done the work tonight, their manager knows that. I know if we win tonight the work isn't done. I look at whether the work is done at the end of the season."
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