Town boss Kieran McKenna says his squad has no new significant injuries going into Saturday’s trip to fellow strugglers Wolves, but with some illness in the camp and Kalvin Phillips and Ben Johnson still not quite fully fit after their knocks.
Phillips rolled his ankle after the Leicester match but has been an unused sub for the last two matches, while Johnson returned to the XI and played the full 90 minutes against AFC Bournemouth on Sunday.
"No, nothing very, very significant,” McKenna said when asked whether there were any new fitness issues in his squad. "We’ve still got a few managing injuries, Kalvin and Ben being two, who are still sort of in between being injured and being back to 100 per cent.
"We’ve got our long-term injuries and we have one or two illnesses in the camp. There seems to be quite a lot of it in the country at the moment, so probably up and down the country probably all squads have got one or two who are not feeling 100 per cent, and we’re certainly in that situation.”
Town have had 16 of their first-team squad unavailable at some point since the start of the season and McKenna admits it’s been far from ideal.
"No, it’s not,” he reflected. "I think it’s been a challenge, we’ve not been able to settle across a team. Certainly on our right side at the moment, we feel the loss of Axel [Tuanzebe] and Chieo [Ogbene], it’s such an important side of the team for us.
"The physicality that those two bring in the most physical league in the world, in the most physical month in the most physical league in the world, we feel their loss at the moment. And for Axel to have been out twice.
"Other than that we’ve had some disruption. But it is what it is, we focus on the players that we’ve got. Again, players who come into the team generally come in and do well in this environment, I think. Jack Taylor was a good example of it last week, even the ability to play 80-plus minutes as he did is a good reflection of the work that goes on.
"But it’s not something we’re happy with. We’d like to have had better availability over the course of the season. But we’re trying to deal with that as best we can and adapt as best we can and I think in general the players are doing a pretty good job of that.”
Reiterating comments he made in midweek regarding his use of subs, he says his bench isn’t going to look like an established Premier League side like Bournemouth's from an attacking perspective even if the likes of George Hirst and Ogbene were fit.
"Even with everybody fit, as I said after the game, it’s not something I'm particularly fussed on because I believe in our players, but our substitutes’ bench wouldn't look like Bournemouth’s substitute bench in terms of experience, Premier League experience, values, all those things,” he continued.
"But having lots of forwards available to rotate, especially in those positions, is really, really important for us. It was a big part of our success in the last couple of seasons.
"So we want to have a full quota of those as often as we can and we want to make those positions as strong as we can, and we tried to make them stronger in the summer window and we need to try and make them stronger in the January window again now because the relentlessness of the league.
"We've been in so many games that we've been in winning positions, we've been competitive in so many games and so many of our games are going to be competitive, if we do well as we have in those games, then they're very, very, very often going to be decided off the bench.
"So we need the starting XI to be as strong as we can and we need the bench to be as strong as we possibly can. So we're going to try and work towards it.”