With competition for places a key component for any squad, there was a collective holding of the breath when both Kelvin Mellor and Zach Clough left the field before half-time in the Emirates FA Cup meeting with Shrewsbury Town on Saturday afternoon.
“Kelvin just felt a little bit tight in his leg,” assistant boss Gav Skelton explained. “He said he could have probably carried on, but with the two games coming up, and the travelling, it’s not worth taking that risk.
“He felt something, hopefully it’s not too bad. It was precautionary because obviously we have a big week ahead of us. I genuinely don’t know how bad it is, we’ll assess it all tomorrow [Sunday].
“I think Zach was similar. He felt a bit tight, so it was precautionary that he’s come off. We’ll see how that goes, we could even wait until Tuesday if we have to.
“To be honest, when he went down you do start to wonder what’s going on. It’s one of those things, you have to deal with it, and that’s why you have nine subs and you get to use them in different sets of opportunities. It’s part of the game.
“The different rules for that in the FA Cup did help. You’ve got the extra subs and extra times you can do it. Looking at the bigger picture it was important because we couldn’t take any risk with them.
“We’ll see over the weekend on how serious they are, but hopefully by doing what we did it means they won’t miss any game time.”
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