Leeds United ready to assess emergency transfer solution after 'negative surprise' injury blow
Leeds United boss Daniel Farke wants the club to monitor potential transfer solutons to a 'negative surprise' at Thorp Arch this week.
The good news from Farke's pre-game press conference was that leading goalscorer Joel Piroe reported back for team training ahead of Sunday's Yorkshire derby with Sheffield Wednesday.
"Overall it was beneficial to have a few days to calm the load down after the festive period and FA Cup," said Farke. "Right now we focus again on the Championship. Patrick is doing some progress in his rehab, he will still miss out January. Joel is back in team training, fully fit and available. All the other players came through the load really well.
"The bad news is that centre-back Pascal Struijk has sustained a hamstring problem and will miss three weeks, in the best case scenario.
"Just one bad news with Pascal Struijk, he reported yesterday a little awareness in his hamstring, he had a scan and sadly it's a muscle injury," said Farke.
"He'll be out for three weeks, miss January and early February probably. There's a small chance the tendon of the muscle is involved, right now it's difficult to judge and we can just assess it when the fluid in the muscle has settled. We can rescan him next week.
"Should the muscle also involve the tendon then Farke could be without Struijk for months and so Leeds will keep an eye on who they might be able to bring in if the need arises."It would be significantly longer in rehab for him, we would not speak about three weeks but three months," said the German.
"At the moment we're carefully optimistic, fingers crossed it's just three games. It's more or less negative news for us, a big negative surprise. If he would be out for significantly longer it would have a huge impact on our plans.
"The ideal would be Pascal back available, he's our vice captain, our rock at the back. We had many clean sheets with him, he has strengths attacking and defending set-pieces. We're better defending when he's on the pitch. A bit of a concern for myself, yes and we have to be a bit careful in terms of the plan.
"I said we would stay awake to the end of the transfer window if there's some business that could improve us and the second topic is if there's more or less a big injury to a key player. If there's an emergency case to be forced to react. We definitely need to assess it carefully. If it's months it's a bit tricky. I have a bit in my head last season, similar situation, similar timing, he had an injury and the diagnosis was three weeks and he didn't play another game for us. It's important we have a look at possible options in case there would be a negative surprise next week."