View: West Brom update on injured ace is big boost in promotion bid
West Brom have confirmed that Grady Diangana has returned to first-team training after spending almost two months on the sidelines with a hamstring injury.
Diangana, 21, has not played since he went off injured four minutes into the defeat to Stoke in January, missing nine Championship fixtures since.
The winger’s injury woes have gone on for some time with him only playing in two of West Brom’s last 15 league matches as before New Years Day he also struggled with hamstring and back issues.
However it now seems that the on-loan West Ham ace is on the verge of returning to Slaven Bilic’s side after West Brom’s official Twitter account showed a clip of him training on Tuesday.
Diangana’s return is going to be a major boost to West Brom’s bid for automatic promotion, especially as Bilic’s men have failed to win in their last three games across all competitions, two of them being losses.
Since Diangana joined the Baggies on loan from West Ham in the summer, the winger has scored five goals and supplied six assists in 21 league appearances.
In total, he’s missed 15 games since arriving at The Hawthorns and West Brom have only won 33.3 per cent of those fixtures.
In comparison, they’ve won 61 per cent of the games he’s featured in.
According to stats by WhoScored, Diangana leads the way in the West Brom squad for the average number of dribbles completed per game [2.3], a number only bettered by four players in the rest of the league.
Diangana also ranks fourth in the Baggies squad for key passes per game [1.3] and is the joint-fifth highest goalscorer despite missing a good chunk of the campaign.
West Brom are a far better team with Diangana but it remains to be seen how Bilic will fit him into his plans once he is back and available to start.
In other West Brom news, Kevin Phillips has called on the PFA and Kick It Out to buck up their ideas after Jonathan Leko was racially abused by Leeds goalkeeper Kiko Casilla.