Manager Paul Simpson updated us on injuries and potential incoming players at Thursday’s press conference.
“Ben Barclay and Josh Kayode are coming on slowly unfortunately,” he said. “Both are still getting discomfort so this weekend will be too early for them. It’s really frustrating, not just for me and the rest of the group, but for the players themselves. Being injured is a horrible time so we’re just trying to help them through it, but we’re having to be patient.
“We’ve waited a long time for JJ and it was disappointing he got that setback the day before he was going to be introduced to the bench. We’re just going to have to be patient and he is as well. He’s had a really tough time this season and last season, but hopefully we’ll get good news on him soon.
“Ben is improving but he’s still getting a little bit of discomfort from some of the work he’s doing so again, we’re just having to tread carefully and hope it settles down quickly.”
“Everybody else came through Tuesday ok,” he continued. “Jack Ellis came off because he was tightening up which is what I expected. Fin wasn’t ready to start that game, we needed to be patient with him. Jack was tired more than anything, so with the extra couple of days he’s fit and available for the weekend, as is Fin.
“We’ve got Terry Ablade who has been signed off from his rehab and is ready to train again. Jokull Andresson has been back in training but has landed on his shoulder again and refractured the same thing. It’s a bit of a surprise because we had him rescanned and it looked like the fracture had healed. It’s broken on the same spot again which is horrendous for Jokull and not great for us. He’s another player we’re going to be missing.
“It’s the nature of the beast at the moment with things not particularly going our way on that side of it, but we’ve still got enough in our group to go into a game on Saturday that we really want to do ourselves justice in.”
And on potential incomings, he said: “We’re still trying to get things done but it’s a really slow process. I was asked about Jake Young the other day and I said we couldn’t afford him, but what I meant to say was that the fee we’ve been quoted was very, very high and if we felt it was good business for the club we could have done something. I didn’t feel it was good business, as much as I thought Jake Young was a good player.
“We’re in a position where we can bring players in, but we’re not in a position where we can go spending ridiculous amounts of money. We have to do what we think is good business.
“Although we’ve got a new ownership group who want to take the club forward, we still have to be sensible with the way we go about it. We are trying to get the bodies in we think we can help us, and we’ll keep doing that until we get them in or until the window closes.”
Following the news that Ryan Edmondson has left the club, on any other potential outgoings he said: “I’m not expecting anything at the moment, there hasn’t been any enquiries for any of our players so we’ll go with what we’ve got.
“We do have some players I would consider allowing to go out if clubs make enquiries for them, but we can’t do both sides of it, we need clubs to enquire about them before we can do anything. I want to have options.”