Jesse Marsch spoke to the media today, ahead of the FA Cup clash against Cardiff City this weekend.
Leeds will travel to Cardiff City in the FA Cup on Sunday and it looks as though Marsch will make some changes to the side that drew 2-2 with West Ham in midweek. New signing Maximilian Wober is looking likely to feature in the match but Marsch hasn’t confirmed either way if the Austrian International will start or take up a place on the bench.
Patrick Bamford, Stuart Dallas, Adam Forshaw and Luis Sinisterra are all missing through injury, so we would expect some of the players who haven’t played many minutes this season to get a runout. Joel Robles, Cody Drameh, Darko Gyabi, Joe Gelhardt, Sam Greenwood, Mateo Joseph and Sonny Perkins are all likely to be included and some may start as we saw in the Carabao Cup against Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Jesse Marsch held his press conference today and gave an update on injuries and shared his thoughts on what will be a tough encounter at the Cardiff City Stadium. Even though the Welsh side are in the bottom six of the Championship table, they always raise their game when the Whites come to town.
Jesse Marsch had plenty to say this afternoon. #LUFC https://t.co/hlehCHKEWd
— Leeds United Live (@liveleedsunited) January 6, 2023
As per LeedsLive, Marsch said “It’s a unique week, we have a lot of guys that are hopeful they can turn around but have a lot of little issues. So I’m not going to give you full updates and I’m hopeful that some of the questionable guys can turn around and be ready to go.”
“We want to put a strong team on the pitch. We know 6000 fans are going down, I know the history of us losing 21 years ago at Cardiff, and we expect that there’ll be a very spirited for this match. So we want to put the best team we can on the pitch.”
“Patrick was in training today. So that was a big step in the right direction. Not predicting him to be ready for the match, but at least in training, Adam would probably not be available for this match, but shouldn’t be training next week. Stuart had a follow-up operation, too, because they thought they had a little bit of an infection so they just cleaned that out but he’s back and feeling good.”
On Luis Sinisterra, he added, “He was on the pitch individually today looking really strong, sprinting, running and looking close. We’re hopeful that at some point next week, he’s back in training, so that’s really positive. He won’t be ready this weekend.”
On Max Wober he said, “Max has I think settled in really well. He had a good training session today. I think again, he understands what I’m looking for out of him and out of our team. So we’ll see how fit and ready he is for this match, but he will be in the mix.”
When asked about Cardiff City and how they are a bit of a bogey team for Leeds, Marsch said, “This is why I think even when we got the draw, we spoke about and we knew this was going to be a difficult draw for us. It’s a bit of a long way by English standards, not by American standards.”
“For me, it’s about having a clear mindset and expecting the best from them and being ready for that. It’ll be a cup fight and I think our ability to play the way we want to play but to understand exactly the mindset of the opponent will be very important and for us to be ready for a real match absolutely in every way.”
Cardiff City v Leeds United is Sunday the 8th of January with a 2 pm kick-off.