15,000 crowdies and growing by the minute

Good Morning. It's Monday 15th June, and here are the latest headlines from Elland Road...

15,000 crowdies, and growing by the minute

Leeds United have sold in excess of 15,000 cardboard cut-outs for their final five matches at Elland Road.

Fans are able to create and design their own personalised Crowdie of themselves to help add atmosphere during home matches at Elland Road. All orders must be confirmed by June 17, at the cost of £25.

Season-ticket holders must confirm they want a Crowdie by June 15 as part of their rebate option. Chief executive Angus Kinnear said...

We are asking fans to get their club colours on and support the Leeds United Crowdie scheme that will see ‘life-size’ cut-outs installed at Elland Road from our first home fixture against Fulham, and remain in place while matches continue behind closed doors.

Friendly against Swansea provided perfect preparations ahead of Leeds visit - Harris

Cardiff Manager Neil Harris believes his team have had the perfect preparation ahead of Sundays crunch game against Championship leaders Leeds.

Bitter rivals Swansea City travelled to the Cardiff City Stadium on Saturday to play two 80-minute games as part of their preparations for the visit of Leeds. The former Millwall boss was quoted as saying...

Playing Swansea is about as close as we could have got to playing Leeds. It was vital. Me and Steve spoke before the game. We know the intense rivalry, the importance of the rivalry and we know what it means to both clubs and both sets of supporters.

But logistically we could only play Cheltenham, Swansea and Bristol City in friendlies. We have Bristol City coming up in a few weeks, so it left us with Cheltenham and Swansea.

You want to make the games as realistic as you possibly can. We have had such a short space of time to prepare. There were no referees and no linesmen, but the lads were brilliant and played in the right manner.

As you can imagine they were two well-matched sides in very even contests. It was a really good exercise for me and Steve. Score-lines were not what either manager was interested in, but they were really competitive and we are just pleased to get the fitness in the legs.

We just hope both sets of players will only have picked up absolutely minor knocks and niggles and everyone can train on Monday.

Influential attacking duo Lee Tomlin and Nathaniel Mendez-Laing both featured during the two games and are hopeful to be fit for Sunday.





Whelan - Leeds should have a back out clause for Augustin

Former White Noel Whelan believes Leeds should have a back out clause over making Jean-Kevin Augustins loan deal permanent. The former PSG hitman has been struggling with his fitness ever since joining Bielsa's side almost six months ago.

He made just three cameo appearances before a hamstring injury looked to end the 22yo's season. Hard work and determination saw Augustin return to action during the corona virus lockdown, only for a recurrence of the hamstring injury to put pay to return.

Leeds reportedly have the option of making Augustin’s move permanent for £18m at the end of the season, although Whelan has questioned whether they will still want to do that following this latest update. Whelan said...

I don’t know where it stands now on signing the player because it seems to me he’s struggling to keep himself fit and you don’t want to take a risk on a player you know nothing about really.

You’ve not seen him fit at his best so it makes it a bigger risk now about making that signing permanent.

There’s got to be something, you’d have liked to have thought they’d have put in he’s got to play a certain amount of games or minutes for this obligation to actually kick in.

We’ve hardly seen him, Forshaw’s played more minutes than Augustin and he’s been injured since September!

We still have no idea what this player’s going to offer us. It remains a massive doubt, there’s got to be a lot of talking to do to justify this signing, which would be a record signing.