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Glen Williams

Dean Whitehead expects to be Cardiff City boss against Millwall as he reveals board talks

Dean Whitehead said he expects to be interim Cardiff City boss at the weekend when Millwall come to town following the club's chastening 5-2 FA Cup defeat by Leeds United.

Whitehead was placed in charge for the match against Leeds as the club look to secure a permanent replacement following the sacking of Mark Hudson at the weekend.

City's Cup exit might come as a relief for some, with Championship survival clearly the most important thing on the agenda.

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And Whitehead knows the importance of the Lions' visit to Cardiff City Stadium on Saturday, with only 19 games to go to climb the Championship ladder.

"I'm just looking forward to the weekend," Whitehead said of his situation. "Prepare the team as best we can. Hopefully we can get a result and we will see what happens after that.

"The league table tells us where the club is right now. We need wins and we need wins quick. We will be prepared and ready for Saturday. We have to start getting results and results quickly.

"The board said to me that Saturday is really, really important, so we picked the team (against Leeds) for that reason, and our focus now is purely on Millwall and getting a positive result against them."

Asked if he expected to be in charge of the club on Saturday, he replied: "Yes."

The last two managers at Cardiff, Steve Morison and Mark Hudson, have been promoted internally to take the job as first-team boss on a permanent basis.

But Whitehead would not be drawn on the prospect of that happening to him. When asked if he had thrown his hat in the ring to get the job full time, he added: "No, I've literally just had two days preparing the team for today and preparing the team for Saturday. We will see what happens after."

His tenure did not get off to an ideal start, shall we say, with two goals flattering Cardiff late on as they lost 5-2 on Wednesday night, albeit to a Premier League club in Leeds United.

Whitehead bemoaned a number of individual errors in his own assessment of the game.

"We made a lot of errors, lots of mistakes," he said. "But we felt that at half time we changed the shape and we looked a little bit more solid at start the second half.

"Then, again, we made some technical errors. We talked about not playing through the middle of Leeds, because of their aggressive counter press. And we got punished every single time that we did make mistakes in that area.

"But to come back in the last five or 10 minutes and score two, I think we have to take positives from it. We have to take that into Saturday.

"It's good to get Robbo (Callum Robinson) on the pitch. He hasn't trained much or played much in the last three weeks. So to get two goals, we'll take a positive going into the weekend."

READ MORE:

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