Phil Parkinson was happy with the way his players performed in the 1-1 draw against Fleetwood Town, but he felt that the hosts were awarded an undeserved penalty and that we should have won. Fair. Parkinson added: “There is a renewed spirit in the camp and the lads are showing the required character to get results. We were all frustrated we didn't get the three points but there was a lot of good signs. We go into the home game ready to perform to the best of our ability and finish this festive period off in good style. They have some good players, have a lot of attacking threat, coming to this small tight ground can sometimes catch teams out. We started slowly but got to grips with it and played some excellent football. We kept going, didn’t force it, drew a mistake out of them. I don’t know what the ref saw there (for the penalty) I will leave the Sunderland fans to watch and judge that for themselves. It is an honest challenge in the box you get 20 times in a game, how the ref has given a penalty I don’t know. It was a poor decision. It didn’t affect is. We dominated for large periods second half and had come good chances, we kept probing, passing, we were patient when we needed to be. There were some great crosses in, we got our reward late on, Chris put it away well.”
Parkinson also confirmed that Leeds have recalled Laurens De Bock. He explained: “Laurens has gone back. He wants to go back to Belgium. Leeds had the option to call him back, and I think it’s more a personal thing for Laurens that he wants to go back home. As far as we are concerned, it’s more wages we can utilise in the window. Luke [O’Nien] can play in that left wingback role because he is two-footed, and Conor McLaughlin can play on the right, and Lynden Gooch can play wingback as well, but that now becomes an area we are looking at – we don’t want to leave ourselves light in any area. I don’t want to be watching training and worrying what we are going to do if someone gets injured, I want to make sure we have cover in all areas.”
