Millwall vs Leeds United press conference live: Daniel Farke offers fitness update as strong squad expected

First of all, he's blessed with unbelievable physicality I have to say, unbelievable endurance and otherwise it wouldn't be possible for a 17-year-old guy on this level to play so many minutes.

We watch him quite carefully to check that there was not too much overload but so far he's done really, really well. He had a minor injury and for that we all decided it's best for him to recover a little bit and also because he's playing so many games on senior level and also like on the top level, I think also for his individual development it wouldn't be too beneficial if he plays too many games more or less on youth level but the biggest problem was more the minor injury and it was good that we gave him a few days off to let that settle but then also during this week he was able to be there back in the team training.

I respect my players as being human beings and also mature and they have a private life. Obviously I always prefer when in their private life everything's okay, but like all human beings is also professional. We all have sometimes our times when it's also a bit tough for us due to private reasons or whatever. And then we still have to keep going in our job. So again, it's also like I asked him to be professional and to concentrate on the hard work.

It always helps to concentrate on your work especially have to concentrate on football to be together there with your teammates and do what you love to because we all love to play and work in football and for that it won't affect us. it won't affect us too much.

If I sense this anyhow on the training pitch or something like this, yes, I would react but I have not sensed anything at all and all my players who are there are available.

The Den is an unbelievably tough place to go. It could also be oppressive for young players, especially in such a tough place. We’ve spoke about this. We can prepare them in a theoretical way but to bring it on the pitch when it really counts, is one of our tasks.

To be honest, I prefer the situation much more instead of having situations where I have a headache how to fill the bench and you're in a situation where we had three goalkeepers with us and we were still not able to fill the bench.

There's always just one solution: hard work, because it's not so much about psychological games or something like this. It's more like ‘come on, work hard, bring yourself into a really good fitness level, concentrate on the performances.

A question mark behind Djed Spence, first of all he missed some sessions in some days due to private reasons and then yesterday in training he got a knock in his lateral [knee] ligament and we need to wait for for some further assessments. Today, it was not possible to train so I would label it as definitely major doubt also for the weekend.

Junior Firpo is out. He trained with us last week but it's quite normal after being out for such a long time, sometimes it's a reaction of the body and yes, some problems with his hip so last days was not possible, for him to train so he will definitely miss the game at Millwall

Liam Cooper back in full team training since yesterday. Sam Byram and Daniel James back the whole week.

All in all much improved on long term list is just Stuart Dallas, but he's also improving. Patrick Bamford is still out. He will also miss the three games within six days, but we're quite hopeful that he will also return back to the to the team training quite soon hopefully even in the end of next week, or perhaps the week after, so it's also much improved.

Much needed and also beneficial. So, the eight weeks before was packed with work and lots of stuff was ongoing and it was also important to yes recover for a few days and it was, was definitely necessary.