Manager Keith Curle confirmed at his Thursday morning press conference that midfielder Nicky Adams is set to miss the next eight months having picked up a cruciate ligament injury during the first half of the Yeovil home game last weekend.
“He’s been to see the consultants in London with our physio Neil Dalton to get the results of his MRI scan confirmed, and he’s now booked in for an operation later this month,” he said. “It is his cruciate ligament, that’s confirmed, so he’ll be out for eight months. Obviously that does rule him out for the remainder of the season.
“It’s a massive miss to us as a collective because of the skillsets he has, and also because of his personality around the changing room. He’s a character who shows no fear and no matter who he plays against he knows what his minimum performance is, and he knows what he brings to the team.”
“A measure of the lad is that when I spoke to him on Tuesday night he couldn’t stop apologising for being injured,” he continued. “He just wants to be involved in what we’re trying to do at the football club. Him not being part of it all is a big blow to him as a person.
“The injury to him means we’ve lost creativity and the question is whether or not you can easily replace a player like Nicky Adams. It’s very difficult because it was a bit of a coup when we managed to get him to come here in the first place.
“He’s backed up the belief we had in what we felt he could bring to the mix with the way he’s played for us, and he’s been a constant supply line and threat. It’s now a situation similar to what we had last season, when we lost goals out of our team, in that we had to find another way to win games.
“That’s what we’ll do now, either with the players we already have here or with additions to the squad.”
With the popular playmaker’s contract up in June, we wondered if the injury could possibly mean that his time in Cumbria has come to a close.
“No, not for me,” the manager replied. “Within the conversation I had with him the other night he very quickly went from being devastated, and understandably so, to talking about what he’s going to do when he’s back with us.
“He’s accepted the challenge of coming back stronger than what he is now. That shows that his mentality has already changed from that of being a victim, to one of being ready to face this new challenge.
“He’s never been through anything like this before but I’m very confident that Nicky will play for us again.”