Ethan Ampadu's Leeds United admission after Coventry loss with promotion view but 'beauty' vow

Leeds kicked off Saturday afternoon’s Championship clash at Coventry with their automatic promotion destiny back in their own hands after a 1-0 defeat for Ipswich Town at Norwich City but then fell to a disappointing 2-1 reverse themselves.

The defeat marked a first league loss of the calendar year and left Daniel Farke’s Whites in third place with just five games left as Leicester City moved top with a 2-1 triumph at home to Birmingham City.

Speaking post-match to LUTV, Whites captain Ampadu admitted United’s players were disappointed at themselves for their own performance and said his side must hold their hands up for their defending at an an early corner from which the Sky Blues went ahead.

Ampadu, though, declared that winning at Coventry would not have meant Leeds were getting promoted and vowed that his side would stick together with the “beauty” of having a quick chance to bounce back in Tuesday night’s hosting of Sunderland.

"We're disappointed, but we're disappointed at ourselves,” said Ampadu. "In the first half, okay, we started well, on the front foot but then we dropped a little bit of intensity and then maybe we didn't defend the set piece well enough from our point of view so we hold our hands up.

"The beauty about football is that we have another chance Tuesday to go and put it right. If we had won today, no one would have said we were promoted. But unfortunately the result wasn't wasn't good enough and the performance wasn't good enough.

"The second half was better, we tried to push. Sometimes you can score a late goal and then maybe the mood is different, but I think for us, we want to go and put it right on Tuesday."

Victory for Coventry kept the Sky Blues firmly in the play-off mix, the hosts sat seventh and four points behind sixth-placed Norwich but with a game in hand. Coventry host United’s key promotion rivals Ipswich at the CBS Stadium on the penultimate weekend of the season.

"They're a good side,” admitted Ampadu of the Sky Blues. “They did well on the break. They made it hard for us to break down. We pushed at the end and it probably wasn't our best performance.

"I know our heads might be down for a little bit today, but all of us, we will all stick together like we have for the whole season. We've had to push for a while and we're going to keep doing that to the very end."