Boss Steven Pressley brought the media up to date with the current injury situation at his weekly press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s nice to Arthur [Gnahoua] around the place because he’s a really nice lad who has been through a tough period,” he said. “He’s certainly getting closer, but there’s still the opinion within the physiotherapy department that he probably won’t make the end of the season.
“It would be a real push to get him there and probably a risk for his sake, considering that he has no contract beyond the summer. We feel that’s a risk not worth taking.
“If we did push him too hard we could make him break down, but there might be a chance for him if we did make it to the play-offs. Hopefully that will be the case.”
“Liam McCarron’s season is certainly over,” he confirmed. “That’s a shame for him, but he knows he has time to get himself right and ready for pre-season.
“Mark [Cullen] is back on the grass in terms of jogging. He hasn’t participated at all with training so far, he’s very much restricted to straight-line running at the moment. We hope that he’ll return to training in another couple of weeks. From there we will obviously need to get him up to speed.
“Macaulay [Gillesphey] trained again today [Tuesday] having had to pull out last Friday. That was nothing too much, just precautionary, so he’s back with us. He needs a lot more time on the training ground, but it’s good that he’s back and amongst it.
“We're hoping Danny [Grainger] will be available for the Stevenage game but he would have had to have trained fully before we travel on the Friday.
“That’s why it was good to have Peter Grant back for last Saturday. He’s had no adverse effects having declared himself as available at the end of last week. That was great, considering he hadn’t trained, and I thought he acquitted himself well. It also showed me that he has a great attitude.
“We’re at a stage of the season where we have to have players who are desperate to play and who want to put their head on the block. He’s definitely one who will do that.”
And on reports from the north-east press that there was interest from Hartlepool in a move for midfielder Jason Kennedy, he said: It wasn’t fully Hartlepool. We actually spoke to them, if truth be told, because I’d spoken to Jason about his situation and he told me he needed to play games.
“We worked on trying to achieve something that suited Jason which was around this area. Hartlepool had a certain amount of loan players at the time [last month] so they couldn’t facilitate the opportunity for it to go ahead. They were interested, but they couldn’t make it happen at that moment in time.
“It went dead, I haven’t heard anything else from them since then, but it was certainly something we tried to work out simply to give Jason the opportunity to play.”
