Earlier in the week Neil Warnock was showing his frustration over the club’s situation, but today he was putting a brave face on it all as he prepared for the game with Nottingham Forest.
The injury situation isn’t getting any better, and this week we learned that Ross McCormack’s injury might be worse than it was originally thought, and the will only be known once he has been able to have an operation on his ankle. And already limited squad has been stretched even further by Luciano Becchio’s Achilles problem, and the Argentinian is unlikely to be able to start tomorrow.
So we really are scraping the barrel up front, and our remaining options are down to picking some combination of El-Hadji Diouf, Andy Gray, Dominic Poleon and our latest scapegoat Luke Varney. It’s no surprise that on Wednesday Neil Warnock was letting his frustration show, saying that he might as well go fishing as his efforts to bring in a striker on loan came to nothing. However, he didn’t specify whether the problem was that there was no suitable player available or whether Bates had refused to provide the money for a loan deal.
But on the official site at least, he was insisting that he was up for tomorrow’s game. "We've got some of our better players out yet have to come up with a result. That's what makes it a great game. When you lose players like we have you're bound to be disappointed. The staff are the same, but I have to make sure people aren't down”.
And he promised that there will be no repeat of the abysmal defending we saw on Tuesday, which was a reminder of the final days of McAllister or Grayson. ”We've worked on one or two things because they were poor calls. Hull had some good players the other night, but that wasn't why they won the game. They won the game because of our elementary mistakes. We gave them goals when we should have been two or three up and killed the game off.”
But there is no doubt that Leeds face another difficult game tomorrow against a club who have actually been able to benefit from a completed takeover by Middle Eastern investors. They are currently seventh in the table, a big improvement on last season’s relegation struggle, having appointed Sean O’Driscoll as manager in the summer.
O’Driscoll was unlucky to be fired by Doncaster this time last year after taking Doncaster into the Championship but finding it hard going with their meagre resources, so he deserves the chance to show what he can do with greater financial backing. And on his own clubs he was talking about the quality he has available on the bench every week due to Forest’s strength in depth.
“The subs in the last two games have been brilliant – people talk about us having resilience but we’ve got that because we can look at the bench and know we can change things. The bench gave us an opportunity to get back into the game against Birmingham and it was the same against Palace.” So the contrast between their situation and ours could hardly be clearer, further proof (if any were needed) that without further investment Leeds simply aren’t going to be able to compete in this division.