Leeds United vs Huddersfield Town: Daniel Farke press conference sheds light on injuries after midweek rotation

In general I’m pretty pleased with Joel. I’m not sure he’s a player like Haaland but it’s always good to learn from the best. It’s important you stay authentic and use your strong. It’s always difficult, with all respect to Swansea they’re a good club, it’s a different club Leeds United, the size of the club, expectations and ambitions. When we play other teams, home and away with Leeds United, it comes with different responsibility. He’s had to adapt to a different setup, he was the superstar at Swansea, here he plays with proper players with big values and good CVs. It’s different if you score for a club where you are the main man or for a team in a different situation. His goal record, I think he’s played nine or ten games, five goals, a really good average. I would have preferred he convert his chances in the last few games. We are pretty happy to have him because of his quality as a player but also his personality, he is a great teammate and great guy. Last two games perhaps not there at his best but quite normal for an offensive player.

Obviously I’m a human being, I do normal things I have to eat and go to the supermarket. We have many occasions with the club when we meet people with their heart and soul Leeds supporters. In the city you can feel the joy when we are successful and the pain when we’re there with setbacks. Sometimes you have to go to the gas station, it’s quite important. It’s quite important we don’t live in the spaceship, we’re all human beings, we just work in a privileged role. It comes along with responsibility. We want to make our supporters happy.

It’s crucial. We are playing football for supporters. Quite often we are speaking about transfers, business and money. Nowadays you have to lead a football club smart, but most important value and most priceless are always supporters. If we forgot about this value and just think about business aspects we don’t get the meaning of football. It’s not a phrase, it’s really my belief. The supporters are more important than any manager, player, board member. It’s a supporters’ club and they are the most important value for us. It’s important you keep in mind while you’re playing for supporters.

I’ve spoken so much about this topic, unbelievably important. You need a proper group who believes and sticks to your beliefs and brings your values and the things that are important into the heads and hearts and souls - you need your leaders in your group. This is what they’re doing in a brilliant way. We have some younger players who grow into this role. We have a young group, so for that I’m also looking forward to having Stuart Dallas more regular in the dressing room. The young players I like their attitude, we have good energy, they are very self-critical, I have to make sure they don’t overthink things too much. For that I’m really grateful and happy they have so many great characters like Luke and Liam for example.

Yes, that’s quite normal. It’s important after every win, our supporters want to dance on the table and after every setback you have this feeling the world goes down. I have the same feeling, I have to stay more calm and more levelled. I’m also not overreacting when we have a little setback. I try to be analytical in this way. Sometimes it’s fine margins because if you would have converted the penalty and scored the first goal, there’s only one team that would have won. Sadly we didn’t use the penalty, concede the goal and it’s the other way round, it’s quite normal for such an emotional club. When this club won the league in a perfect way, there were nine losses. Last time I was promoted with Norwich there were six and seven losses. 46 games, no team goes through a season without a difficult spell. This league is competitive. The toughest league in the world. If you don’t have this mindset that you keep going after setbacks, you have to react in the right way and ensure no back-to-back losses.

Overall very happy, more happy when we have clean sheet. Hope we can return to that behaviour. We conceded this unlucky own goal but you can’t blame Pascal for this. They’re just overall, I’m pretty pleased overall with their performances. While we are in really good position in the table, is also one key that we are rock solid in terms of defending. We like to attack but the basement is to be rock solid. Even there there is space for improvement. We could do even better, do with another clean sheet. I have to give compliments to Joe, Pascal. Overall with my centre-backs I’m pretty pleased.

It’s important you have competition in training, also Charlie has played a lot at international level. Mateo Joseph was involved [for 21s] after a lack of game-time. Charlie has played several games during the international games, we felt it wasn’t necessary to have more minutes and to train with us instead. We will decide from game-to-game.

Always someone we have to be careful with his injury record, last time he was able to play three games in seven days but each week is different - we make a late decision with him. He came through the game with a few knocks but we’ll make a late decision.

Junior is back in team training, Stuart is doing some individual training, Djed in last stage of his rehab. I hope Stuart and Djed can return to team training soon. I hope pretty soon in the next 10-14 days he [Spence] will return to team training.

Not at all, difference to Ipswich is not important. I don’t like that we always have to be concerned about things. If someone offered position 3 after the difficult summer, I think people would have said that would be great. It’s the Championship, sometimes there’s a little setback. For us it’s just important we deliver good performance and good results. I want to use our possession better than we did at Stoke.