We caught up with Dolly this evening to get an update on the Jeff Smith injury situation:

Jeff was sent back over to Middlesbrough last night in readiness for an X-Ray today. At this stage, it's just a precautionary procedure, mainly because we need to see if there are a number of reasons causing the amount of swelling that we have seen, rather than just ligament damage alone. I expect that the X-Ray will put my mind at rest on that.

Having said that, it's definite that he has done his ankle ligaments. We will have his ankle scanned at some stage next week, as soon as the swelling has gone down enough for us to do that. 

The injury itself came from a tackle. It was very similar to what happened to Eduardo, although obviously not as bad. The player hit him on the inside, with the bottom of his boot, and he then went over on the outside of the ankle, so the joint was under pressure from both angles.

When I first went on to see him he told me that it felt like the lad had caught him on the inside of the ankle, with the studs. I initially had a look in that area, but I spotted the swelling on the other side as soon as I tried to stand him up and get some weight on to it. He tried to walk on it, but it was already swelling up and causing him a lot of pain. Andy Horn came on and helped me to get him to the treatment room, and the whole joint had swollen over within five minutes. I knew then that it was a bad injury.

We need to wait for the scan results before we make a full diagnosis, but it really doesn't look good for him at all. Hopefully we'll get him scanned on Tuesday or Wednesday, and we'll know more from it, but my initial thoughts are that he could be out for the remainder of the season.

Scott Dobie came in today, and he is feeling much better, but he has lost about 8lbs in weight, which isn't ideal. He's not the biggest of lads, so he can't really afford to lose that much weight in such a short time, but things are looking up for him.

He has been doing some cardio-vascular work with me, but we now just have to wait and see how he goes on for the rest of this week. We'll see how he reacts and hope that we can get him involved at the weekend.

That's all for now,

Dolly