‘Incident has been photographed’ – Bielsa delivers update on Alioski incident in Leeds v Burnley
Marcelo Bielsa has said that he has the same information as everyone else with regard to the Gjanni Alioski incident from Saturday’s game against Burnley.
Alioski made a gesture to Dwight McNeil that led to the referee talking to both managers and captains.
After the game it was confirmed that a report had been sent to the FA with another report claiming that McNeil may have spat on Alioski.
Sean Dyche was asked if the FA report contained a racial element but he declined to comment further.
Bielsa was asked about the incident on Monday morning and said, “It’s the same information you have available to you in the media. The incident has been photographed & described. At that moment I saw there was an issue but didn’t observe the details.
“And that’s why I didn’t make any comment in the post-match press conference. And that precaution was the correct one as I couldn’t give an opinion on something I didn’t see.”
Waiting game
We’ll have to wait to see if the FA are going to take this any further.
We’ve seen what Bielsa has said he’s seen and the Leeds manager has taken the right course of action here.
We don’t know what was said either by McNeil or by Alioski, and we don’t know what the report sent to the FA says, so we can’t really pass judgmenet.
Watching in real-time, it looked like a childish reaction from Alioski and nothing more – and he has history of this sort of thing – but we’ll need to wait to see the full story.
If anything does come of it we would imagine it won’t affect Leeds with Alioksi likely leaving in the summer.
In the meantime, we expect Alioski to start against Southampton on Tuesday after a run of good form.
In other Leeds United news, Two Leeds first-team stars won’t play again this season, attacker a doubt v Southampton