Your Leeds United views: New signing? Be careful what you wish for!

The transfer window is dominating debate among the Ellland Road faithful.
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GMcG, via website

I’vE been looking closely at the way this season has panned out so far for Leeds United. We started with new management, Liam Bridcutt got injured and Charlie Taylor was under a bit of a cloud one way or another, so no surprise really, it took a while for results to settle down.

That settling down, along with the arrival of Pontus Jansson (remember all the negative comments about signing a Serie A reject?) saw us begin to turn the corner but even then we were still nowhere near as solid as we appear to be now (remember the performances at Bristol City and Derby, the careless loss of points at home to Wigan?).

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After six games we had dropped 14 points and were already eight points behind Newcastle and four points behind Brighton.

Now I’m well aware that anybody could look this up, but the reason I’m reminding everybody is because it’s easy to forget just how quickly we’ve progressed from being a bit flaky and prone to dropping silly points to the stage where on Friday there was a kind of inevitability about the eventual result. Even if Tom Ince had equalised immediately after Chris Wood’s goal I think most of us would have been confident that we would just step it up and get another.

It’s more than 10 years since I’ve had that kind of confidence in Leeds United. Along the way I’ve heard and read doom and gloom about what will happen if we don’t recruit a better goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders, wingers and strikers.

Along the way I’ve also heard and read complaints about the performances, or lack of impact of, amongst others; Chris Wood, Kemar Roofe, Hadi Sacko, Souleymane Doukara, Ronaldo Vieira (even after Friday and Steve McClaren’s glowing praise), Taylor, Rob Green, Marcus Antonsson, Stuart Dallas..... you get the general idea?

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Along the way, this squad has been maturing, has successfully covered for injuries across virtually every area of the pitch and despite Wood continuing to be the main scorer of goals (that is the way we’re set up after all) we’ve begun to see goals come from all over the pitch.

Best of all, we’ve rocketed up the league. In the meantime Garry Monk has said he is only looking for one or two new recruits but doesn’t appear to be fussed whether we get any or not and on Friday night with a makeshift back four we put in the performance of the season so far.

In short, be careful what you wish for. On the back of this season alone, this squad already contains players who are worth millions of pounds in their own right but more importantly it has the kind of spirit and togetherness that can take years to build and is simply not available to buy.

This squad is good enough as it is. If we can recruit better players in any position that can be integrated seamlessly and without disruption then great. If not, let’s leave well alone and let Monk, Pep Clotet and James Beattie keep on doing what they’re already doing because I think I can guarantee you that right now nobody in the Championship wants to play Leeds United.

moorechris67, via website

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First things first, Ronaldo Vieira is going to turn out to be one of our most important player in midfield.

Chris Wood needs cover, not a partner up front. But in certain games, Garry Monk might opt to play two attackers depending on the opposition or how some games develop. but Marcus Antonsson is good enough and I don’t know why yet it hasn’t happened for him, but I don’t blame anyone, it just hasn’t fully clicked and he’s not played enough games.

Do you remember in August and early on in September, Wood was not hitting the target, He was struggling to find the net, then he got going and look at things now?

I think the same could be true for Antonsson but we cannot afford the luxury of playing him alone up front as we did Wood, but somehow he needs to fit into the system because he can score goals and is a poacher-type of goal scorer as well as producing goals from nothing. Let us hope he gets going soon...but let’s not blame anyone or anything for why he isn’t yet doing for us what we expected.

The main thing is we are winning most of our games at the moment, rather than losing and drawing.