Town boss Kieran McKenna says forward Nathan Broadhead is in a good place and should be involved at Oxford United this weekend, while fellow new frontman George Hirst is very close to being able to start.
Broadhead, 24, missed last week’s 1-1 home draw with Plymouth due to some muscle tightness but McKenna says the £1.5 million signing from Everton has trained with his new teammates this week.
"He’s doing better,” he said. "He’s trained with the team for the last couple of days and is in a pretty good place, so all being well over the next 24 hours he’ll be involved this weekend.
"We would have loved to have had him last weekend, he would have loved to have been there, but he’s one player coming into a 22-man strong squad.
"It’s not fair to put it all onto his shoulders to come in and, as I said last week, he’s an investment for the club that we want to get on the pitch as soon as possible for an immediate impact, but he’s also an important player for us in the more medium and longer term.
"We’ll get him the appropriate amount of minutes we think is right to influence the team at the moment, but also protect him and ourselves for him to be available and successful for us in the second half of the season.
"We’re looking forward to having him in the squad, hopefully on Saturday, but again he’s a young player coming into a good group and he’ll have a part to play but it will never be about one individual player, it will always be about the team.”
Regarding Hirst, 23, who made his Blues debut from the bench against Argyle, McKenna was asked whether the loan signing from Leicester is ready to start.
"He’s very close,” he reflected. "He hasn’t started lots of games or many 90 minutes of competitive football this year, but he’s been training all season, he hasn’t had injuries, he’s played some behind closed doors games when the Championship was on the winter break.
"We think he’s ready for good minutes and we’ll see plenty of him on the pitch I’m sure over the next few games.”"
Having had illness sweep through the squad and injuries coming with great regularity, McKenna says the situation is much better going into Saturday’s match.
"The squad looks pretty strong, there were a couple of players had little issues going into last weekend in the end that needed managing but they’ve got through the training week well in the last few days,” he said.
"Apart from the long-termers, if everything goes well in the next 24 hours, then we’ll have a relatively full squad to choose from.”
Despite he freezing conditions in recent days, McKenna says training hasn’t been particularly affected.
"Not too much, no,” he said. "We’ve managed to get on the grass every day. There are only certain areas of the training ground that we can get covered to prevent the frost, so we’ve had some grass areas that we’ve managed to have covered and we’ve been out on the grass every day.
"We’ve had to adjust a few little things but in general we’ve been out there every day and we’ve had a good training week.”