Noel Whelan names Leeds player he’d have replaced Lasogga with

Follow us on Google Discover

Leeds United suffered an agonising defeat in the Championship after a dramatic game at Elland Road.

Noel Whelan has told BBC Radio Leeds that he would have replaced Pierre-Michel Lasogga with Hadi Sacko during the latter stages of Leeds’ clash with Millwall on Saturday, rather than throw Conor Shaughnessy on for the final minutes at Elland Road.

Thomas Christiansen’s side suffered an agonising defeat in what was an enthralling game against the Lions. After falling 2-0 behind and going into the break with only 10 men on the pitch after Liam Cooper had been sent off, few would have expected Leeds to turn the game on its head at the start of the second-half.

However, the Whites managed exactly that as they scored three times inside the first 20 minutes of the second-half, with Pierre-Michel Lasogga scoring twice and Kemar Roofe bundling home another for the home side.

But the game turned once again before the final whistle with Millwall scoring in the 87th minute and finding the winner in stoppage-time, and that led to plenty of scrutiny regarding Christiansen’s substitutions – most notably, bringing Lasogga off and replacing him with Shaughnessy in the 83rd minute as, with Roofe already replaced, it meant that Leeds had no strikers on the pitch.

And Whelan has also suggested that he would have made a different change, suggesting that Sacko would have been a better replacement for Lasogga.

“Personally for me, if I was going to take Lasogga off, I’d have put Sacko through the middle and make him run the channels and run in behind them, because you could see that they were lacking in legs for a lot of that second-half,” he told BBC Radio Leeds.

“You put him through the middle, he’s going to run channels all day. You just ask him to use your pace, run the channels, work hard, keep the ball in their zone in the 18 yard box and you just pen them in.

“You use the pace against them because any straight balls over the top and we were hitting them on the counter-attack, there’s no doubt that, but then when you put a defensive midfield player on, you’re just inviting pressure.”

In fairness to Christiansen, had he brought Sacko on and the result ended the same way, he would have probably attracted even more criticism as the winger’s performances have not exactly filled the supporters with confidence this term.

Though Shaughnessy is still fairly inexperienced, he and the rest of the Leeds defence should have been able to see the game out by that stage regardless of whether they had an out-and-out attacking player on the pitch – and it must not be forgotten that the likes of Pablo Hernandez and Gjanni Alioski were still on the pitch, so Leeds still had players capable of running forward and relieving some of the pressure.