Leeds United 3 Blackburn Rovers 2 - Marcelo Bielsa hails extraordinary victory and underlines his love of the game

Kemar Roofe produced two goals in five added minutes to send Elland Road wild and snatch a 3-2 win from a dramatic game which Leeds looked destined to lose at the end of normal time.

United trailed 2-1 in the 90th minute after Blackburn defender Charlie Mulgrew followed up his earlier penalty by smashing a free-kick past Bailey Peacock-Farrell but Roofe levelled amid a goalmouth scramble 60 seconds later and sparked euphoric scenes in the 95th minute by heading in a Pablo Hernandez cross

Roofe had delivered at precisely the same time away at Aston Villa on Sunday, sealing a 3-2 win in Birmingham with a volley in the fifth added minute, and his 12th goal of the season took Leeds three points ahead of Norwich City, who also scored twice at the death to draw 3-3 with Nottingham Forest.

Bielsa, who rarely shows emotion, claimed the Boxing Day drama disguised the fact that Leeds deserved to beat Blackburn comfortably but said he had been “moved” by the celebrations caused by Roofe’s winner.

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“It was moving for all of us,” United’s head coach said. “In football you have emotions which reach a peak and a high level. That's why nothing is comparable to football when it comes to emotion.

“They are very important points because this is a league where you don’t win any game easily. We deserved to win but we won in a different way to what we usually do.

“We changed the destiny of the game in the last seconds but it's a little bit unfair to define it like that. We couldn't say that it was unfair to win this game because we did all that needed to be done.

“In the first half it was clear that we deserved to be winning by more than two goals. After the first half we didn’t imagine that the end of the second half was going to be like that.”

Roofe’s goals in the past week have salvaged four precious points, although Bielsa admitted his side were under more pressure to beat a mid-table Blackburn Rovers than they had been away to a Villa team who are three points off the top six.

“They were two different games,” Bielsa said. “Before the game against Aston Villa we could have said that they were an opponent with the same level of performance as us. Before playing today, the opponent had a different level of performance.

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“Even if the two wins look alike, the feeling after the game against Aston Villa is different to the feeling we have today because today we had an obligation to win. That was not necessarily the case against Aston Villa.”

Leeds remain six points ahead of third-placed West Bromwich Albion, the team below the automatic promotion positions, and have opened up a 14-point gap to Birmingham City in seventh.

The victory over Blackburn in one of the most remarkable results witnessed by Elland Road in recent memory, was their seventh in a row, United’s best run of league form for 11 years. The club have not won eight consecutively since 1931.

Bielsa, however, denied that his squad had taken control of the Championship, saying: “Not at all. It doesn’t matter what the ranking of a team is. It’s very hard to win against any team. We can’t say we are clearly superior to our opponents when we play. It’s very hard for us to impose our style.”