Leeds United may be faced with yet another tight, deep defence when they play relegation-battlers Stoke City on Thursday.
The Potters’ boss Michael O’Neill spoke to the media after Saturday’s 4-0 thrashing of Barnsley and suggested very few people will expect them to get a result.
United’s league leaders have lost once in their last nine fixtures and hold a six-point advantage to Brentford in third.
However, as Luton Town proved last week, they do not always enjoy facing defensive sides playing with a deep block and 11 men behind the ball.
While O’Neill did not get into tactics, he admitted it would be a tough match and less expectation to attack United.
“You can look at the league table, but the important thing is that you take care of yourself,” he said.
“We’ve got to 46 points. Everyone talks about 50 points being the magic number. I’m not sure it will be. I think you may need more than that this season.
“We’re coming off a good performance and a good result and we’ll take that into Leeds, which is an extremely difficult game but one where there is possibly less expectation on us.
“If we can take something from that game it will help us and then we’ve got a game at home against Birmingham [City].
“Our focus is on Thursday. We can’t control what happens with teams around us and we are emphasising to players to concentrate on the game ahead of us, play that game and make sure you get as much as you can out of that game.”
Former United loanee Sam Vokes also faced the press after the game. He said the team were looking forward to facing the title contenders on Thursday.
“We’ve got belief in ourselves but we let ourselves down in the last two results and the performance, definitely, at Wigan,” he said.
“It was important we reacted and we did that in the best way against Barnsley. It’s down to ourselves and we know we’ve got enough in that dressing room to do the job.
“There’s a lot of football yet to be played and we know the results we need to get. We’ve got a big challenge coming up but we’re looking forward to it.”
