Town boss Kieran McKenna has revealed that full-back Ashley Young has suffered what’s feared may be a significant hip injury, a problem more serious than the other fitness issues affecting his squad at present.

McKenna mentioned that an unnamed player had picked up a problem in training this week with Young revealed as that man when the squad was announced ahead of the Sheffield United match.

That injury and the other fitness issues in the squad, led to some of McKenna’s selections at Bramall Lane, including dropping Leif Davis to the bench, the left-back coming on for his 150th appearance for the club and only his third as a sub.

“We lost Ashley Young during the week, so we had to make a couple of decisions today to do with freshness and protecting players because from a fully fit squad to now Chuba [Akpom], Jaden [Philogene], Nacho [Marcelino Nunez], Ash, pretty significant injuries all of them,” McKenna explained.

“And Leif put in a big, big shift on Tuesday night and on Saturday, a long away trip today and with Jacob [Greaves] in good form, with the numbers that we’ve lost, we thought it was more sensible to protect Leif a little bit today with the number of games we have coming up.

“Ivan [Azon] similar in some ways in terms that he played really well the other night but has not really played many back-to-back games and worked so hard for 75 minutes and with the injuries that we have, we need them all fit.

“We need everyone to play between now and the end of the season. It’s not going to be one XI. You look at the schedule that we have, we’re going to need [everyone].

“And I do trust people to come in and play in any game. We’re going to need the squad, we’re going to need people to step up at different moments and today as a team we didn’t do well enough and we need to own that as a group.”

Having said in the week that Philogene, Nunez and Akpom’s injuries, knee, ankle and groin problems respectively, weren’t too serious earlier in the week, McKenna was pressed on describing those issues as significant.

“Jaden will be the first one back, I would have thought, but not exactly sure when yet,” he said.

“Marcelino will certainly be a few weeks. Chuba, hopefully, not too far away. Ash has been to see a specialist earlier this week, it looks like it could be a little bit more serious. We’ll have to get a judgement on that early next week.”

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