Should Leeds United have gone up? Whites duo reality and Farke question to answer: David Prutton

I can honestly say that having first hand knowledge of it. Leeds might have hit the bar late on with Dan James but there were not many clear cut chances for them.

Southampton had their clear cut chance and the fella that they could rely on for the best part of a year did exactly what he had done 23 times before that so fair play to them. And then really they just managed the game out. Southampton had to defend at times but there was no real jeopardy in the game for them. They weren't getting battered and there was no onslaught.

I think you have got to really admire what Southampton boss Russell Martin has done and how he did it. Both sets of fans were great, noisy and 85.000 people watching a game of that magnitude just shows how big it is.

All the fans I bumped into were cautiously optimistic but with a bit of trepidation which obviously bore fruit in the result and once again Leeds in the play-offs not covering themselves in glory.

But I thought Daniel Farke was quite measured afterwards, as he should be. There's lots of things to be positive about but obviously the overriding thing is that this division is all about promotion and especially for a team that has just dropped out of the Premier League. It's all about promotion.

Two of those teams did that, the outlier being Ipswich and it now means another long season ahead for Leeds in the Championship. There are now potentially questions to ask and bids to rebuff for all of the crown jewels.

Should Leeds have gone up with the squad they had? You could maybe say that but they weren't one of the three best teams that left the division. With Leicester, as much as people point the finger about their style of play, they got it done.

Ipswich had an amazing season and I am intrigued to see what happens with them next year. They dealt with the pressure, dealt with people saying they were going to fall away and then Southampton worked through ups and downs and runs of form and defeats that they had to manage and then managed the biggest stage.

From the outset, yes, Leeds should have been in the absolute chat as they were in for automatic if not at the least the play-offs. But just because you have got a good team on paper, it doesn't matter and they didn't perform on the day. They talked about missing out on automatic but having a second chance in the play-offs. But they didn't take it in the most important game.

They did wonderfully well to get through the semi-finals and really heavily beat a Norwich side that were poor. But they came up against a Southampton side who had their own set of wants and needs and assumptions and lived up to the billing and lived up to the expectations, simple as that.

Leeds haven't turned up in several games this season and that's because they are inherently inconsistent. These players that we are talking about didn't light up the Premier League did they? Crysencio Summerville didn't, Georginio Rutter didn't.

Some of them have experience of very high levels of football but they are inconsistent so that's why and if they weren't inconsistent they wouldn't be playing for Leeds in between the Premier League and the Championship. That's the simple answer.

It quite clearly sounds like Daniel Farke is going to remain in charge and is that the right call? I think given what he has done when he has had the right tools at Norwich, he made automatic promotion look relatively straightforward.

So if he is in a position where he has a set of players that can do what his Norwich side did then yes. I mean who else would be out there that could be tasked with the same kind of question and thrown into that same kind of mix?

There's people like Steve Cooper but Cooper has done it once, Farke has done it twice. I'm not saying then that makes Daniel Farke twice as good but you want promotion so you get people who have achieved promotion which is exactly what Daniel has done. Whether he had the right players, whether he had the strongest squad to be able to do it, it's now down to them.

So Leeds now need to work out if they can tool up, if they can keep hold of their best players, if they can have a squad that's capable of competing because you've obviously got the three teams that came straight back down again that will be wanting to go again from their point of view. But if you end up getting 90 points but unfortunately you are not as good as two other sides in the division then who else are you going to get?

I've read bits and pieces about Daniel's tactical nous and the decisions that he makes. Taking Summerville off 20 minutes before the end of the game - even though he wasn't having the best of games, you potentially, for the last throw of the dice, you could just throw on as many people as you possibly could.

But then I'm not a highly educated in both football and a kind of professional sense football manager so what do I know? I have just seen a lot of games and played a lot of games. So when you are looking around about who is available unless somebody steps out somewhere then I don't know.

I knew nothing of Enzo Maresca until he stepped forward into the Leicester City job and as much as people said he didn't have a plan B, his plan A was pretty flipping decent in going up as champions. Whether you Judge Daniel on a single season at Leeds or whether you think the grass is always greener? I genuinely don't know as there was a lot of good stuff.

If the same team that was blitzing teams and looking solid as a rock for the opening few months of this year turned up at Wembley then it'd be a different conversation altogether.

The main thing is, as much as you put the team together, and I think barring obviously Pascal Struijk and Patrick Bamford, the team in the play-off final was as close to their first choice as you are going to get.

But the players just didn't perform, they were nowhere near clinical enough, nowhere near decisive enough in possession so the team that you saw batter a really poor Norwich side didn't turn up against a Southampton side that are fundamentally better than 21 other the teams in that division so congratulations to them.