Leeds United training camp diary day two - rain and pain as teen impresses and new centre-half appears

Oliva seems nice enough and would seem even nicer in the summer months but the first week in December is proving a little chilly and a little rainy. Warm weather training this is not. Warmer than Thorp Arch, perhaps, but that's about the height of it.

And the raindrops mixed with beads of sweat on reddening faces of Jesse Marsch's players and some of his staff members on Monday morning as they ran until they dropped. Diego Llorente was spared the pain, of this sort anyway, as he travelled south to Murcia for an operation on a fracture in his hand, sustained on day one of the camp. But with elite football's penchant for stats, data and bringing every player up to the boil, you get the feeling Llorente's torture was merely deferred to a slightly later date.

The early part of the session featured some short, sharp agility-focused sprinting, side to side stuff and top speed work. It wasn't all Oliva Nova Athletics Club, they did have the footballs out and they did play a fair bit before the laps of the pitch perimeter began.

If day one was all about disrupting possession, day two was how to build it, starting from the back with Joel Robles and then Dani van den Heuvel. Marsch, again, switched players in and out of the team building the attacks and the one opposing them, and once more the two sides set about one another.

Llorente's absence required the participation of Marsch's coaching consultant Frankie Schiemer, who ordinarily works remotely but has joined the squad in Spain for the week. He played at centre-back alongside Darko Gyabi, initially, with Liam Cooper and Robin Koch partnering one another at the heart of the opposition defence and Pascal Struijk becoming a left-back once again.

'Simple connections' were what Marsch was after, players being in the right place, with the right body shape to receive in order to find players who should be in the right place to their left or right. When that wasn't an option, Leeds went more direct or looked to hit the flanks and there were some lovely switches in play from the 6s in particular.

Joe Gelhardt scored a truly beautiful goal, arguably the moment of the morning, scooping the ball into the net from an acute angle. Willy Gnonto danced nimbly away from the attentions of two defenders to put a goal on a plate for Cody Drameh, only to be chided by Marsch over his starting position as the move developed.

The lowlight of the session was the sight of Crysencio Summerville down on the turf in pain, nursing a sore ankle, following a Marc Roca challenge. He walked off the pitch and sat out the rest of the morning's training as a precaution.

Among the more aesthetically pleasing moments was a pinpoint daisy-cutting channel pass from the increasingly impressive Leo Hjelde that put Gnonto in again, with Mateo Joseph profiting from the Italian's assist on that occasion. Then, after a debrief, it was time to run.

What is interesting about the timings of the training exercises is that Marsch relies on his fitness and sports science staff to let him know where the players and the squad are in terms of their workload and distance covered, before making calls on when to call it and move on.

To finish, the players were split into four groups and ran laps of the pitch inside certain times. Each group had a coach monitoring their pacing and coaches Ewan Sharp and Schiemer joined in. Other than Summerville, the only player not doing the laps was Gelhardt, who ran the width of the pitch alongside Rene Maric.

Cody Drameh led his group out and paced the first lap, with a gap to the rest of his pals, before being reeled in by the group as captain Liam Cooper hit the front for the rest of the way. Robin Koch's group kept a tight formation of two ranks of two for almost the entire duration of the task, which was given to them three times, and Adam Forshaw showed his middle distance ability with a strong showing in his group.

The full-time whistle brought relief and sent a number of players to the grass in agony, but Sam Greenwood and Darko Gyabi couldn't wait to get to the extras. Van den Heuvel was again the man to face the firing squad, Greenwood pinging three outrageous free-kicks past him, leading Marsch to quip that the youngster should do sprints before taking them in games: "You're better when you're tired."

The last man out on the pitch, with Mark Jackson by his side, was Gyabi who went through some finishing drills. This wasn't the last of their work, a gym session was to follow later in the day, but it represented a serious stepping up of the intensity as Leeds build towards the Premier League restart.