Wayne Veysey

Sun 12 February 2017 12:32, UK

By Alex Stevens

Noel Whelan has urged Garry Monk to drop one of the team’s holding midfielders against Bristol City next Tuesday.

Liam Bridcutt and Ronaldo Vieira have been the two selected central midfielders in the starting XI for the last two matches, which ended in defeat to Huddersfield and Cardiff respectively.

BBC pundit and ex-Elland Road striker Whelan has called on manager Monk to change the line-up to improve the team’s chances of scoring goals.

Whelan is convinced the Championship promotion hopefuls have become over-reliant on spearhead Chris Wood for goals and need their midfielders to take up some of the slack.

The division’s second-top scorer has netted a remarkable 18 of Leeds’ 42 league goals this season, an extremely high percentage for a team with ambitions of earning one of the three promotion places.

The next top scorer is Souleymane Doukara, who has scored five times in the league and was axed from the starting XI for the 2-0 defeat to Neil Warnock’s Cardiff on Saturday.

A Leeds side that featured nine of the starting XI that had lost to Huddersfield six days later came unstuck after making an encouraging start to the match and having 71 per cent of the possession in total.

Whelan believes the answer to the goals problem could be to change the system or the personnel, with one of the defensive midfielders making way to provide more targets for playmaker Pablo Hernandez.

“Maybe Leeds could try one defensive midfielder next week – they just need to try to get more balls into the box,” said Whelan to BBC Radio Leeds, as quoted by their matchday blog (Saturday, 5.14pm)