Leeds United ready to recall Alex Mowatt for Middlesbrough test

The 20-year-old has not played for the Whites since January’s 2-0 loss at Sheffield Wednesday where the midfielder picked up a leg injury, not long after being troubled by a groin problem.

But United assistant head coach Paul Raynor revealed that Mowatt has impressed in training at Thorp Arch this week, with tomorrow’s under-21s game in Stocksbridge the latest part of his recovery.

“Alex has had a few days’ training now and he will play some part of the under-21s game tomorrow which will be good,” said Raynor.

“He certainly won’t play all of it, but it will be good to get him back out there.

“We could have probably pushed him to play a part against Forest but as we saw with the Chris Wood situation with him breaking down, we err on the side of caution.

“He has trained very well this week, he will play some part and it will be good to have Alex back available again.”

Raynor also confirmed that long-term absentee Gaetano Berardi is set to return to training next week but striker Chris Wood remains sidelined with a hamstring problem and will definitely play no part against Middlesbrough.

Raynor added: “With Chris, the gaffer has spoken about time-scales with him and we have really got to be very careful with Chris.

“We certainly don’t want a recurrence of the problem we had at Brentford. I don’t think we rushed him back, it was just one of those things and it was actually a problem lower down in the hamstring, it wasn’t actually the originally injury.

“But obviously it puts some tension on to that area so we are really going to have err on the side of caution with that and we certainly don’t want a recurrence of that.”