Good Morning. It's Thursday 3rd October, and here are the latest headlines from Elland Road. Extent of Gruev's injury set to be revealed We will learn the extent of Ilia Gruev's timescale for recovery later today, after undergoing extensive scans on the knee injury he picked up at Carrow Road on Tuesday evening. The Bulgarian International managed just 20 minutes at Carrow Road before hobbling off. It couldn't have happened at a worse time, with his double pivot partner (Ampadu) ruled out until January with a similar condition just days before. Leeds will call upon AO Tanaka and Joe Rothwell to deputise, but it's far from ideal. Beyond that, they have Charlie Crew and possibly Issac Schmidt who has played as a midfielder before. After the Sunderland game, the walking wounded have a two week break (UEFA Nations League) before Sheffield Utd visit Elland Road on the 18th. please log in to view this image Schmidt could return to action at Sunderland From the walking wounded, Issac Schmidt is the most likely to return to action tomorrow evening, as Leeds take on early pacesetters Sunderland at the Stadium of Light. The news comes following Daniel Farke's pre match Press Conference, with much of the focus revolved around injuries to key members of his squad. Ethan Ampadu, Manor Solomon, Max Wober, Dan James and Isaac Schmidt have all missed important matches, causing the gaffer selection headaches. Schmidt, a €4.5m (£3.7m) Summer signing from Swiss outfit St Gallen arrived at Leeds carrying a thigh injury, restricting him to just 8 minutes of game time so far. He was bought in as cover and competition for Junior Firpo but has experience in central midfield, as a defensive midfielder or at right-wing back. According to the gaffer “Like always, after a competitive game a few hits and knocks but no one ruled out for the game. We have a few injured players from the last few weeks. I don’t expect one to come back. “Isaac Schmidt looks a bit better so we will try tomorrow, our last training session before the game. If he comes through, he could be involved but I expect him to be the only one who could return back.” please log in to view this image Leeds trio walking suspension tightrope Wilfred Gnonto, Joe Rodon and Jayden Bogle are already walking a suspension tightrope having already been booked three time this season, over their opening eight games. Four players (Amps, Gruev, Firpo and Struijk) all have two yellows, with James and Rothwell on one-a-piece. Players must avoid five bookings before matchday 19 or face a one match ban, or a two game ban for ten yellows before the 37th game. Any player who receives 15 yellow cards in a Championship season will be benched for 3 games! please log in to view this image
Next month is huge. We can't afford any more injuries during international break and we need positive results ourselves in next two games. On another issue, couldn't help wondering to myself while watching Villa beat Bayern, how they got it all right and we got it so wrong. Five years ago they were in same boat as us, approxametly same size club, had a **** manager when we had Bielsa. They've now got a great squad, a world class coach who'd walk into any team and flying it in cl. We've gone through a succession of Gerard standard coaches till our decent one now and arguably our squad is no stronger than five years ago. Frustrating as hell watching it last night
We replaced Bielsa with Jesse, they replaced their guy with Emery, we then squandered around £100m on players not good enough because Jesse could not coach what we had and we ended up buying some dross I did have the same feeling a couple of weeks back, frustrating isn’t it. Like Brighton not wanting to sell White to a relegation rival and thinking to myself Brighton might be relegation material we’re not
Good morning Ristac and good morning everyone. Some great points about Coaches above, but Villa must have some great staff behind the scenes, as so do teams like Brighton/Bournemouth/Forrest etc, who you wouldn't think could survive in the PL, as i touched on before absolutely staggers me with our resources that we couldn't do the same at the time.
Big problem we have is players can see we have no ambition. OK owners want to be PL and babble on about extending stadium but players aren't interested in long term plans and that's the reason every single one of them are out the door as soon as they get any kind of offer. We wont build anything if we keep selling our best every season and can't show them were serious about progress. It always seems our owners do just enough to keep enough fans happy to keep the ground full and sell shirts and that's the sum total of the ambition.
The Celtic defence anytime the Dortmund players ran towards them please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image
