The postponements of the Barrow and Hartlepool meetings mean a switch to Tuesday evening home games for both, with a run of Saturday-Tuesday fixtures now a possibility through the latter part of January and early February, pending finalised details for the Cumbrian derby.
“Whenever the games are, it doesn’t bother me at all,” manager Paul Simpson said. “If you ask footballers they want to play games rather than train.
“It gives us a little bit of extra work to do in terms of it being Saturday-Tuesday but that isn’t a problem. We’ll deal with it. We will hopefully have enough bodies to be able to deal with it.
“I haven’t had chance to look yet at the fixtures to see when the first available date would be for us to fit Barrow in. We’re both out of the FA Cup, but so are Mansfield, so their game on that weekend will go ahead on that third round day.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, we’ll deal with it when it comes and we’ll prepare properly.”
“I keep saying it to the players, we won’t use anything as excuses, we’ve just got to get on with it,” he added. “We know we can’t play that first week in January, so that’s something we’ll look at in terms of how we structure that week.
“And we’ll just have to make sure we’re ready for when the busy run of games come. We’ll use that weekend of the postponed Hartlepool game for a bit of a mid-season point where we can get them freshened up and ready to go for that second half of the season.”