Sam Walker will miss the home match versus Wigan on Tuesday night with a knee injury.
The goalkeeper is awaiting the results of a scan after he was sidelined for the last match at Bristol Rovers, Nik Tzanev having replaced the on-loan Reading keeper in that 0-0 draw.
First-team coach Rob Tuvey did have good news though about the fitness of Ethan Chislett, who is set to make his comeback after an Achilles tendon injury in a development fixture on Tuesday.
“Sam was back at Reading today, so we are awaiting the results of his scan, just to find out how he is, and hopefully it is not too bad,” said Rob. “We won’t know though until we get the scan results back from Reading.
“Ethan will get 45-60 minutes tomorrow for the development squad away at Stevenage. There are other boys too that are increasing their minutes, including Jack Madelin. He will get up to 75 minutes tomorrow and so too will Zach Robinson. It will be more competition coming into the squad and that’s what we want.
“There won’t be much change at all (for the Wigan game). We’ve got 23 players available at the moment and they are all vying for 11 spots, which is fantastic. I think we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, especially when you look at the strength of our substitutes’ bench, that we’ve got quality within the squad and we do believe that if we stick by them we will get results.”
Rob added that it had been a positive day at the training ground as the squad seek to build on creditable displays away from home by taking all three points at Plough Lane versus Wigan.
“Robbo is really big on getting the team in and going through a preview and a review, which is so key to the process that we are going through at the moment,” added Rob. “We had a really good meeting this morning and the players are having more of a voice within those meetings as well. They are coming to us with clips that they watched themselves, which is what we want, and we can really now build upon that. We had a really good training session today, and now we are all ready for Tuesday.
“Keeping a clean sheet on Saturday was obviously a massive step, but we know at times that we have to create more and attack more. Hopefully, by getting more players into the box we can build upon the attacking play that we showed in the last 15 minutes on Saturday.
“I don’t really look (at the table). From what I’m hearing, it’s changing all of the time. It’s up and down. We are working in a process driven environment. We know there are certain things we have to do, on and of the field, in order for the team to perform, so that’s all we talk about in this building at the moment. It’s about how we have to keep improving those processes and keep evolving as a team. Hopefully, on the back of that we will see improvement, and the results will come.”
Click on the link below to watch Rob Cornell’s full interview with our first-team coach.