Kalvin Phillips on Leeds United's frustration, on-pitch arguments and Blackburn Rovers

Kalvin Phillips, who believes Blackburn Rovers will attempt to stifle Leeds’ free-flowing football on Saturday, admitted that Luton Town’s defensive approach in midweek at Elland Road led to some uncharacteristic exchanges between team-mates towards the end of the 1-1 draw.

It also brought a confrontation between Pablo Hernandez and Hatters boss Nathan Jones, when the former complained about Luton’s style of play and the latter responded in Spanish with a remark he later apologised for.

“We were speaking about it yesterday as a team,” said Phillips.

“Luton came to not get beat and came to frustrate us and just sat back.

“As a team we find it more comfortable going at a team that’s coming at us, catching them on the counter attack and just having a good battle.

“With Luton it frustrated us a little bit, you kind of saw that towards the end of the game, us players arguing and stuff. It’s not really in our nature to start arguing between ourselves.

“We had a talk yesterday and said no matter what happens, as long as we’re confident in ourselves and as a team we’ve got to keep on fighting to try and get results.”

Despite Luton’s best efforts, Leeds still created a plethora of goalscoring chances and like his boss Marcelo Bielsa, Phillips takes confidence from the Whites’ attacking menace.

He says greater accuracy will help them to unlock stubborn defences but to give themselves the best chance of a positive result, they just need to keep the ball out of their own net.

“Sometimes you can get a little bit of frustrated but we know that we’re going to create chances at any time of the game,” he said.

“Just be more accurate, be more consistent with the passes that we’re using to go forward and try not to be wasteful of chances.

“The amount of chances we have we should score more goals, it’s just the way we are, the way we play, we play with such high energy sometimes, the lapse in concentration could be right at the end of an attacking movement.

“We know we’ve got to score goals to win games.

“A massive thing is that if we don’t concede we know we’re going to get a result.”

Leeds travel to Lancashire to face Blackburn tomorrow knowing they’re in for another tough game and hoping injury victims Liam Cooper and Stuart Dallas, who hadn’t trained with the team by the time Phillips spoke to the media on Thursday, could still be available.

Phillips sees the absence of a particular opposition player as key, however.

“We know they’re a good team,” he said.

“They’re missing Bradley Dack at the minute and he brings a lot to their game.

“I played against him the last two years and I think he’s a great player. He brings a lot to their team, scores a lot of goals from midfield and he’s a massive miss. Hopefully he can get back playing as soon as possible.

“[But] they’ve got great players, they’re not going to let us come there and play the nice football we play. They’ll try to disrupt and frustrate us like all the other teams. It’ll be a good game. If we play like we have in the last few games I’m sure we’ll get three points.”