‘Give each 50/50 situation to the away team’ – Farke on Donnarumma injury stoppage in Leeds’ defeat to Man City | OneFootball

Daniel Farke suggested Gianluigi Donnarumma faked an injury in order to allow Pep Guardiola to give his players a team talk during Manchester City’s 3-2 win over Leeds.

Farke’s Leeds side came back from two goals down to level the score at 2-2, before Phil Foden scored his second of the game in stoppage time to win it for City.

But the Leeds boss says that while within the rules, he is not a fan of goalkeepers feigning injury to allow managers to give instructions to their players.

“Everyone knows why he went down right? It’s not like an elephant in the room,” Farke said.

“It’s within the rules, it’s smart. If I like it? If it’s in the sense of fair play? If it should be like this? I keep it to myself. I’ll leave it with the authorities to find solutions to it.

“It’s within the rules. I asked the fourth official at this point ‘do you want to do something?’, he said ‘no, our hands are tied, we can’t do anything’.

“We know this happens but if we don’t educate our players what to do in terms of fair play, sportsmanship, whatever, if we just try to bend the rules to your advantage, and you can even do a fake injury in order to do an additional team talk, I think it’s nothing that I, personally, like, but if it’s within the rules, I can’t complain about it.

“I think we should think about how we deal with it and how we educate. My recommendation was, right now, if this happens, do me a favour and give each and every 50/50 situation not for the home team but more or less for the away team.

“Everyone knows what is going on. If I’m honest, probably after 90 minutes at 2-2 I would have blown the whistle and that’s it and not additionally let them play further on.

“I think there are tools you can use to make sure that this won’t happen but if we don’t use the tools, probably we have to change the rules a little bit. There’s a reason why the goalkeeper goes down and not the outfield player because the outfield player has to go out.”