Here’s the second part to Chally’s interview with Chris Park after Saturday’s Buxton game. In it he discusses his new loan signing, Jamie Allen, and the latest situation with injuries to the squad.
Jamie Allen will do well for us. I’ve watched him two or three times this year when he was available for loan and it’s been quite a stretched out process in trying to get it done but he’s fit, he’s sharp, he’s strong, he’ll without doubt score goals. I think the problem today was that he only had one chance as we didn’t pass him the ball or create enough opportunities for him to score, which is a collective thing.
In terms of the defence, we’re not looking to add to that position at the moment. We’ve got the two centre backs, we’ve got Luke who can fill in there as well as playing right back or left back. Caspar’s been playing full back but with Luke we’ve got cover right across the back four. If we had one more injury we might look at something.
Blinks is coming back from a long term injury so what bringing Jamie in does is allow us to re-introduce Blinks at a pace that suits everybody and we don’t have to rush him back. We’d love to have him back next week but if we’re realistic about things, that won’t benefit us towards the end of the season as it’s all about getting him back fit and when he does come back it’ll be like us having a new signing.
So we’ve got Jamie in for two months, realistically Blinks is probably about a month away from being properly match-fit, so if we can get him involved in a couple of reserve team games, playing 45 minutes and then increase his minutes week-on-week that’s what we’ll do.
We’ve also still got Tom Eckersley to come back who can play at centre back. In a similar situation he’s been out for a long time and when he was reintroduced he picked up a hamstring strain so has missed the last couple of weeks but he’ll be playing with the reserves on Thursday.
There are options but what we’ve got to do is make sure that if we do have issues in terms of injuries we can then push the button on whether it’ll be a loan signing or whether it’ll be a seven days notice on someone, which we have planned to do anyway, so if we need to do anything then we know that we can get players in.
So if we can keep the two centre halves, and certainly Brad, fit that will be a massive benefit to us come the end of the season.