Carlisle United Football Club

“I’ve had a phone call from a manager but we’re still at the stage where we’re talking about finances,” he said. “The situation we have here is that I need to move people out to make room available, both in terms of bodies and finances. 

“I have a meeting with John Nixon on Tuesday morning and we’ll be discussing the loan situation, ins and outs. We like Connor Brown and Tom Anderson and if finances dictate we can keep them then we would certainly look to do that. They are two young men who have fitted in and they have a determination to do well for themselves.

“If things don’t happen above and beyond that then I’m not too despondent about what’s in that changing room. They’ve shown every other week that there is enough in there. We’ve made players available for loan to see if there is any interest out there. I’m not going to force people out the door and they definitely aren’t going to be shut out. I’ve told them that as and when I need them I expect a performance, so they need to stay ready.”

“Part of that is to take advantage of the reserve and bounce games we organise,” he explained. “We have five trialists playing at the game we have at Burnley today. It will be a centre back, a left winger, a midfielder and two centre forwards. 

“It’s also another opportunity for those people who haven’t been playing 90 minutes recently to keep themselves topped up and to apply themselves. Antony Sweeney is a great example of that. We told him before the Blackburn game last week that he was playing so that we could keep his fitness levels up. He went about it in exactly the right way. He set a great example as a senior player and that’s what we want to see.”

And on the players who are still to lodge formal replies to their contract offers, he said: “We would expect some form of reply by the cut off point on Wednesday from Potts, Beck and Dempsey. 

“The players know they’ve had their official letters and they know the timescales involved. The difference here to other contract offers is that these lads are still our players. The worst that can happen is that they are still with us on Thursday morning, so it’s not like they move on elsewhere, or anything like that. If we don’t hear from them on Wednesday we’ll drop it until the following Monday, because we tend not to discuss these things on a Thursday and Friday before a game.”

“Brad Potts isn’t back in full training yet but he’s progressing onto the grass through the early stages of this week,” he told us.  “If there’s no reaction we’re hoping he might be back for then end of the week and available for the weekend. We’ll know more on that after today.

“Troy Archibald-Henville is another who will be back on the grass this week but it all depends how much training time we can get under his belt. We need to see if there’s any reaction and, if there isn’t, he could be back and available as well. Sean O’Hanlon is fine and we’re waiting to see how Alex Marrow is after his bout of sickness last week.”