James Wilson and Luke Matheson have been ruled out of Saturday’s trip to manager Paul Cook's old club Wigan Athletic, while the Blues boss has one or two other injury issues in his squad and admits he has a big decision to make on whether to start Kane Vincent-Young, who made his long-awaited return as a sub at Portsmouth last weekend.
Wilson, 32, was substituted in the second half of the game at Pompey and Cook says the central defender won’t be involved at the weekend.
"James Wilson’s been feeling his knee, he had some fluid drained off it on Monday,” saidCook, who held his pre-match press conference this morning with the squad having a day off tomorrow and leaving early for Wigan on Friday. "Obviously, as you could see with the substitution on Saturday, we were aware of that.
"There are one or two issues around the squad and it does hamper doing exactly what we wanted to do.
"One hundred per cent I want to keep you in the loop, but we also sometimes just don’t want to let other teams and everyone know our business. But James won’t be involved on Saturday.”
On-loan Wolves right-back Matheson, 18, hasn’t been involved since his second appearance for Town agains Northampton more than a month ago before Cook took charge at Portman Road and the manager revealed that that’s due to the former Rochdale man having picked up a knock.
"Luke’s been out injured now for three weeks, I think it is, so Luke hasn’t been available and isn’t available for selection,” he said.
"As you can see, one of the things with the press, especially my local press, I try my best not to discuss every single player at the club because it just becomes tedious for everyone.
"Probably not for you guys because we’re not winning enough, are we? You might start asking me more questions about football. Rather than the individual personnel at the club, it can get a bit tedious.”
Town will also be without striker Troy Parrott as he's away with the Republic of Ireland full squad, while centre-half Mark McGuinness is also expected to be unavailable as he's with their U21s.
Asked whether Vincent-Young, who prior to last Saturday hadn't played a competitive match for 17 months, is ready to start - something which would allow skipper Luke Chambers to move in the centre of the defence in Wilson’s place - Cook admitted it’s something he not yet convinced is the case.
"I’m not so sure,” he reflected. "I think when you’ve been out that long, as you can imagine, everyone wants us to put him back in, myself included.
"But you’ve got to also respect how long the boy’s been out and how many actual 90 minutes he’s had.
"We don’t want him to break down, so that’s a big decision, by the way. That is a big decision because one of the things we do know is we’ve got to start winning football games quickly if we want to be where we want to be.”
Asked whether the former Colchester man is his type of full-back, he added: "Since I’ve come in now, the five games, you learn so much about the club every day, every single day I’m learning so much about what a great club it is.
"I think it’s quite consistent that people who know me and know how my teams are set up, everyone knows how I want to play, so I don’t think debating that in terms of our players [is something I want to do], our players need belief and confidence now. They need to believe that I believe in them, that they can achieve success this season.
"If they keep listening to me in interviews saying that I’m not happy with this and I’m not happy with that, then the reality is that they’ll go the other way on me, and that’s not what I want. I want the best of what we’ve got to shine through for the rest of the season.”