Graham Kavanagh on the injury situation
United manager Graham Kavanagh gave us the latest on the injury situation here at Brunton Park.
“There’s no real change with the injury situation at all,” he said. “Sean O’Hanlon has trained for the first time today having done his rehab work through the first part of the week. He feels good so that is a huge positive.
“I don’t know if he’ll be ready for the weekend until we see how he is over the next few days. As much as the game is important on Saturday I think the remaining games are even more important. I need him to be fit for as many of them as possible.”
“Paul Thirlwell had a couple of injections on Monday and we are waiting to see what reaction he has with that,” he continued. “Again, it looks positive with him at this moment in time. We’ve had bad news with Liam Noble because he is potentially going to be out for the rest of the season.
“That one is a huge blow. He has torn some of the ligaments in his ankle and, unless something miraculous happens, I don’t expect him to feature for us in the next ten games.
“Mark Gillespie has now had two weeks down at St George’s Park and he is still moving very slowly. Matt Robson has had treatment on his back which hasn’t reacted in the way we had hoped. We don’t know at this stage if that’s a set back or just a reaction to what he has had done. We’ll assess it over the next few days and hopefully things will be clearer on Monday in terms of the timeframe.”
“We’re waiting for the results of the scan from Pascal Chimbonda,” he said. “He’s slowly getting better, but it is very slow. He was supposed to have a scan on Monday, but the timings were mixed up, so he ended up having it yesterday. We won’t know any more on that until we get those results back because, as things stand, we can’t determine whether it was a kick, a pull or a strain.
“We’re doing as much as we can with him without making things worse. It’s a big blow because he’s been our outstanding player for the last two months in my opinion. All we can do is regroup and come up with a strategy that’s good enough to get us a result.”
“I’m hoping I can get more of them fit sooner rather than later,” he confirmed. “I need a pool of players to be giving me selection problems and more of the kind of positive issues that I would much prefer to have.”
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