Why Leeds United's Jesse Marsch must make the best of a 'bad situation' at Newcastle United

There would be a certain degree of sympathy as well.

Over a good few years - long before Marsch's time at Elland Road - United's festive and New Year fixtures have been altered at the whim of television companies.

Wednesday’s appointment with champions Manchester City was a classic case in point.

All of the Boxing Day round of Premier League matches were shown live on Amazon Prime, but Leeds's next opponents Newcastle United who did not see their fixture altered to accommodate the streaming service, with their game at Leicester staying at 3pm on Monday.

By marked contrast, Leeds were handed the worst kick-off date and time as they took part in the tenth and final ‘Boxing Day’ fixture on Wednesday.

The upshot is that while third-placed Newcastle have five full days to prepare for Saturday's 3pm meeting, Leeds have two-and-a-half days less preparation time.

Leeds expended a great deal of energy in the 3-1 loss to City and changes will be inevitable with the likes of Crysencio Summerville and Jack Harrison entering the thoughts of Marsch, who also has Tyler Adams to call upon again after suspension.

Newcastle also had the luxury of making effectively able to 'coast' the final hour of their win at Leicester after going 3-0 up inside half an hour.

The intensity is likely to increase markedly come the first whistle on Tyneside against a Leeds side hovering just above the relegation positions.

Marsch commented: "It's obviously not the best situation when the schedule comes out and then they change our match day and then we know we have three days’ rest and Newcastle has five.

"And by the way, Newcastle and us are the two most intensive teams in the league, we know that then the turnaround is going to be really important and the demand is going to be high for us.

"We have a lot of respect for the way Newcastle play and the results they have got and the job the manager has done. So we know we're in for another really tough match.

"It will be about trying to get the players like Jack and Cree and some of the others closer to being really 'match-ready' and then about recovering the others so that we can go again.

"We pushed training over the last four weeks so our fitness levels would be high and we'd be ready for this. I think we will be.

"Some of the (selection) decisions we made (on Wednesday) were to protect guys a little bit to make sure that with a quick turnaround in a busy couple of weeks, we can turn around quickly.

"With Cree, we just felt like we didn't want to push because we wanted to not risk him and the same with Jack Harrison."

Having utilised a 4-3-3 formation against City, Marsch says Leeds will stick with that, with subtle variations providing a degree of flexibility.

He added: “It can look like a diamond, sometimes it can look like 4-2-2-2 and it can look like a 4-3-3 or ‘Christmas tree’. It can look like different things based on what we want to achieve with what the opponent's trying to do.”