West Brom boss Sam Allardyce questions players dedication

The Yorkshire side won automatic promotion to the Premier League alongside the Baggies just five months ago.

But Marcelo Bielsa’s men taught them a footballing lesson to ruthlessly sweep them aside 5-0.

The visitors were gifted an opener early on when Romaine Sawyers inexplicably passed the ball into his own net for a bizarre own-goal.

But Leeds then went on score three times in nine minutes to have the game wrapped at by the break.

Ezgjan Alioski, Jack Harrison and Rodrigo were the men on target with Raphinha scoring after the interval to secure a commanding win.

The Baggies had entered the game on the back of an impressive draw at Liverpool.

And Allardyce, who replaced the sacked Slaven Bilic less than a fortnight ago, admitted he has been left shocked by just how inconsistent his new group of players is.

“Their inconsistency is on a massive scale,” he said.

“Look at the Manchester City and Liverpool performances.

“The players have to realise – whatever they think they are is not enough.

"I said you must work harder at the club and look after yourself even better than you are away from club.

“If we do that we can get better together.

“But the performance against Leeds put a lot of doubt in my mind about their dedication.

“Leeds didn’t only play us off the field, they ran us off the field.

“They have to get stronger in the mind. If you do that it can make you run faster.

“If I was to get a gun out and point it to their heads and said 'I'm going to shoot you' they would run as fast as they possibly could.

“At the moment when I look at the fitness levels of us and Leeds there was a big difference. I could see it.”

Before the game, Leeds and Albion had the joint-worst defensive record in the Premier League.

But while the Baggies gifted Bielsa’s side an opener, Allardyce was hugely disappointed with his team’s reaction and felt his side wouldn't have scored even if Leeds had played without a goalkeeper.

"I expect us to overcome that disappointment," Allardyce said when asked if Sawyers' own-goal set the tone for the game.

"It’s a huge blow when you see something like that happen to the team, particularly in the position we are in and the lads thinking ‘what can happen to us next?’

"But you’ve got to dismiss that from your mind.

"It’s got to make you more determined and make you have more fight.

"It has to make you produce more quality and try and get back in the game without conceding another goal. That is the way you go forward.

"The one thing I said to the players before they went out, the one thing we have to do is stop going a goal down and putting ourselves in a positon where we are chasing the game.

"Normally the opposition score but this time we scored it for them.

"But you have to try and overcome that and we failed to do that on every level.

"We let Leeds overrun and us and we didn’t show any of the grit, determination or quality we showed against Liverpool.

"We have a problem in transition. When we tried to go forward, because Leeds do leave a lot of space, we couldn’t seem to get back from that.

"The lack of transition into a defensive unit - Leeds took full advantage of that.

"I’ve told the players, we have got to be able to go and attack a team and we have got to be able to defend properly if we lose the ball.

"Against Liverpool, because we had such little possession, our focus all the time was on defending.

"We did it very well and made it very difficult for Liverpool. But we can’t always play like that, we have to try and play and attack teams because we have to win games.

"We wouldn’t have scored against Leeds if they didn’t have a goalie."