United boss Paul Simpson confirmed that he’ll be leaving his weekend squad confirmation until the last possible minute as he waits to see how a group of his injured players are over the coming 24-hours.
Having intimated earlier in the week that Owen Moxon and Ryan Edmondson are chomping at the bit, he told us: “They’re progressing, they’re coming on.
“We’re going to give them as long as we possibly can for the weekend, but I think it’s probably fair to say that this Saturday might be too soon for them. We’ll just have to wait and see.
“They’re an important part of the group, and I’m just going to have to watch as they get the right attention, and we’ll see what Saturday brings for us.
“They want to be out there, and that’s Morgan, he wanted to be fit the day after, even when he had his medical boot on.
“He wants to play, as they all do. Owen’s saying he wants to be fit for this weekend. We’ve just got to be careful with them. We’re talking about a long season and we haven’t even really started yet.
“We can’t take risks. We’ve got to take more of a medium and long-term view rather than just a short-term fix.”
“There’s nobody else that’s close, unfortunately,” he added. “We have the long-term absentees of Josh Dixon and Joel Senior, so they have a good while to go yet.
“Brennan Dickenson goes in for his operation tomorrow morning, so that’s the start of the recovery period for him. Tobi Sho-Silva is still the end of September, that’s our thinking on that one.
“Taylor Charters had a bit of a setback last week because of the recurrence of the injury, and we don’t want to rush it, we want to be right with him.
“Paul Huntington is another few days closer to being fully fit, but again this weekend is probably too early, and Ben Barclay is about six weeks away.
“I’m hoping that come the Gillingham game, or the one soon after, we should be in a position where we have more players to choose from, and that will be when the selection headaches start for me.”
“We’ve got a good balance to our squad,” he commented. “I’ve tried to put a group together that gives us a couple of options for each position, and we have a little bit of flexibility in our front five.
“It’s going to be how we go about it as to who plays, whether we go with a midfield three, or one midfielder and two number eights.
“We could have two strikers or a front three, we have that choice, and we can adapt to how we feel we can best exploit the team we’re playing.
“There’ll be times when we have to adapt within a game, and the players on the bench will allow us to change it as necessary.
“I am really, really looking forward to getting them all fit. Joel Senior probably thinks it’s such a long time ago since he played, it’ll be great to have him, and Morgan, Owen, Tobi, Ryan, Taylor, Josh, Scott – I’m probably missing some out, but they give us such good options once they’re back with us.”
In terms of being ready after the abandonment of the game on Tuesday, he said: “It doesn’t affect the mindset in any way and, in fact, it doesn’t get mentioned at all.
“Come Wednesday morning it’s gone. We didn’t talk about last weekend on Monday morning, it’s just done. Once we’re in and we’ve done the reviews that we need to do to perhaps help us to improve, there’s no point looking back.
“It’s all about the next game, looking forward and getting ready. The sole focus of training this week was about Stevenage and what we think they will do against us, and what we want to do against them. Hopefully the players will go out there and put it into practice.”
One thing that is a hangover from midweek is the yellow card that stays with Jon Mellish, even though every other aspect of the encounter is expunged.
“There’s just no point in trying to work it out,” he told us. “I gave up a long time ago with trying to work out with what goes on with some of the rules there are.
“I don’t have an answer, it’s madness. It was a poor booking to get, a silly one, stupid to pick it up, but it happened. The game counts for nothing, we have to go back there at the end of September, and that’s one of the ridiculous rules that many people will probably complain about.
“It’s there, it’s in place, we just have to get on with it and take it on the chin.”
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