Farke sends classy message to Leicester City and Ipswich Town as Leeds United focus on play-offs

Daniel Farke has congratulated Leicester City and Ipswich Town on their promotion to the Premier League as Leeds United look to quickly regroup for the Championship play-offs. The Whites went into the final day of the regular season with a slim chance of securing a top-two finish.

However, the Tractor Boys secured second spot, beating Huddersfield Town 2-0 to leave United battling it out in the play-offs. The Whites go into the end-of-season knockout competition in poor form after suffering back-to-back league defeats to Queens Park Rangers an Southampton.

This will be Whites chief Farke's first experience of the play-offs. Farke, who hopes injured pair Daniel James and Patrick Bamford will be fit for their two-legged tie with Norwich City, told Sky Sports: "It is a new competition again. We draw a line under this. We have to say congratulations to Leicester and Ipswich. They fully deserve to be promoted and we fully deserve to be where we are.

Read more: Leicester City squad taunts Leeds United after promotion collapse in end-of-season awards evening

"We are the third best team in this league on 90 points. Normally in each and every other season, you would go up automatically but in this special season, perhaps in one or two per cent we were not good enough in order to be better than Leicester and Ipswich so congratulations to them.

"Right now a new competition starts and what happened before doesn't matter. We want to prepare in a perfect way and hopefully some of our important players will come back to training.

"We then have to make sure we are there with two good games against Norwich to earn the right to go to the final."

The German was unhappy with their defending for the Saints' two first half goals. "I was a bit frustrated in the manner of the goals that we conceded," he said. "It was definitely avoidable."