Tyler Roberts made his comeback for Leeds United’s U23s today.
Leeds United’s official Twitter account retweeted an interesting statistic this afternoon.
Whites duo Pablo Hernandez and Mateusz Klich are two of the most creative midfielders in the Championship so far this season.
Klich has set up 17 chances for his Leeds team-mates, while Hernandez is on 16. The only player with more key passes is John Swift with 23.
It makes for good reading if you’re Patrick Bamford or Eddie Nketiah, Leeds strikers who depend on service to score goals, but it might not fill a certain Tyler Roberts with a lot of optimism.
Roberts, a £4 million signing in 2018 [Daily Mail], made his first appearance of the season in Leeds U23’s 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace this afternoon.
There’ll be a few more youth games before the Wales international is ushered back into Marcelo Bielsa’s squad.
But with two rival players performing as well as they are, the former West Brom youth has a huge challenge of displacing either Hernandez or Klichc.
Roberts is a number 10 these days and a very capable one, after Bielsa started playing him there at the beginning of the calendar year following Samu Saiz’s exit, and the truth is that Klich and Hernandez are simply undroppable right now.
That isn’t to say that their form won’t drop when the Leeds youngster is fully fit, strengthening his chances of playing ahead of one of them, but if those two carry on in the same vein then it’s going to be so difficult for him to break through.
It’ll be disappointing for him if he has to ride the bench for an extended period of time, having helped the Elland Road club reach the playoffs last season. Roberts will have hoped that he’d be a regular fixture in Bielsa’s side again this season, but there are big obstacles in between him and playing every week.
He might be very close to being fully fit again, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s close to Bielsa’s XI.
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