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Leeds New Manager Arrives To Big Injury List For Crunch Game With Southampton

Saints travel to Elland Road with the home fans hoping for that new manager bounce, but the new arrival in the hot seat Javi Gracia has an injury headache before he rallies his troops for the the proverbial six pointer.

Javi Gracia starts his second spell in English football with the same opponents as in his first, back in January 2018 Gracia joined Watford and his new team travelled to St Mary's and where beaten in the FA Cup 1-0 with Jack Stephens scoring in the 4th minute for the only goal of the game.

Stephens is still officially at Southampton, but out on loan at Bournemouth at present, so that means that there will not be one player in that days starting line up who will play in the game at Elland Road, only James Ward Prowse who was an unused sub that day will take part in Saturday's game.

Saints fans will be hoping for a repeat of that result up in Yorkshire this weekend, but Gracia has problems before he even starts, reports say that up to 8 of his squad could be out.

Top scorer Rodrigo hit 10 goals in 18 Premier League games, but he has been out injured for the last month and is not expected to return until April.

Luis Sinisterra has played in 12 of Leeds 23 games and is not expected to be fit for this one, he returned a month ago after 3 months out with injury, but a rush of games in a short period of time has proved a bit much and he missed the last two, defeats to Manchester United and Everton .

Marc Roca has played most of the games in the Premier League for Leeds this season, but not the last 3 and he too is touch and go for this one.

Stuart Dallas is a long term casualty and has not played this season, likewise Max Wober who has played just 5 times both will miss this game, they are joined by other long term injury list members Archie Gray and Adam Forshaw,, they are expected to be back by the end of the campaign, but not for this game and the same applies to Sonny Perkins.

So Gracia could be missing as many as 8 players from the squad, although most of them are longer term injuries there are at least 3 who have played major parts so far.

Rodrigo is the biggest miss, Leeds have scored a respectable 28 Premier League goals and he has 10 of them, that is a lot of firepower missing.

Saints of course have a few injuries themselves, Tino Livramento now having been out for 10 months and clearly suffering a set back in his recovery, but Kyle Walker Peters is returning as is Juan Larios and hopefully Che Adams and Mohammed Salisu will have shaken off the knocks that stopped them being in the squad for Leeds.

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