It was bad news for midfielder Taylor Charters following his scan at the end of last week when it was confirmed that he faces a spell on the sidelines as he nurses a nasty hamstring injury picked up during the second half of the Carlisle City game in midweek.
“I’m being told it’s a 2C tear of his hamstring,” manager Paul Simpson said. “I think I’m right in saying that means he’ll be out for six to eight weeks.
“Because it’s on the same hamstring, although in a different area, we’ve just got to be careful and conservative with it. It’s a blow, a real blow for us.
“With him being out, and Dylan McGeouch not being available as well, we are a little bit short on numbers. We’re going to have to have a look around and see if there are any free agents who are fit and ready to come in, and who can come and make an impact straight away.
“Firstly we’ve got to see if there’s anybody out there, and then see if the board will let me go and do it. I think we are slightly over the budget at the moment. Only slightly.
“This is what we’ve got, we’ve got to work with them, and hope they show the desire they did for long periods of the second half to go and affect Tuesday night properly.”
And on the conversations he’s had with head of recruitment Greg Abbott, he told us: “To be honest, we’ve had those conversations.
“We’re very wary about taking free agents in at this stage because of the levels they’ll be at in terms of fitness, and you run the risk of them getting injured, which we can’t afford.
“We’ve just got to wait and see. It’s difficult to know what’s the right thing to do, but if there was somebody out there who we thought could come and help us, we’ll be trying to do it.
“We need to, we have to improve. I’m not deluded enough to think the whole garden is rosy because it’s not. We’ve just got to keep working to be better.”
