Injuries timescale as new triple blow leaves Mansfield Town threadbare again

Just at a time when their lengthy injury list was clearing, Stags lost both Max Dickov and George Maris just before last weekend's 3-1 home defeat by Huddersfield Town and then lost Rhys Oates during the game.

“Its been a good week with George Maris getting injured just putting his boots on in the gym, losing Max Dickov twisting his ankle in training on Friday, and then Rhys Oates on Saturday,” said boss Nigel Clough.

“You have these little spells where over five or six days it feels like the world is against us.

“Max is the best of them all in terms of being only a couple of weeks, though it did swell up quite a bit and bruising came out the next day.

“We hope he may be okay for the FA Cup game at Accrington.

“And, we have had some freak injuries over the years, but George Maris was putting his boots on coming out the gym, twisted his knee and is now on crutches, is having an operation next week and will be out for three months.

“Rhys is still quite sore – he's had a scan and we are waiting for the results from it. We think he will be a few weeks.

“Again he is so unlucky as we were waiting to make four subs at 3-0 down, got a goal back and literally said let's give it a few more minutes as we were having a good spell with momentum and might have pulled another goal back, and he did it in that three minute spell.

“If we'd not scored the goal he would have come off and he'd have been fine now. He felt nothing before and has been fantastic for the last few weeks.”

Stags gave Elliott Hewitt a run out in a Central League Cup game at Derby County on Tuesday with a view to a return while fellow defender Baily Cargill was on the bench on Saturday.

But Clough said: “The other injured players are nowhere near close – Tyler Roberts and Luke Bolton will be out a few more weeks and Regan Hendry was eight weeks from when he did his.

“So it is going to be a tough few weeks for us.

“We are getting players back but the trouble is they are all defenders. It's the other end of the pitch where we are losing people.

“We've lost the three or four people who play behind the forwards.

“But we have plenty of centre halves and we might even throw one up front during a game if we need to for nuisance value.”

He added: “Every single club seems to be having a run of injuries and, personally at our level, I put it down to the August schedule.

“You do your five or six weeks pre-season and all of a sudden you are hit with eight games in 29 days if you win a cup game. That is too many and has severely affected us.

“We knew this current run of fixtures was going to be incredibly tough no matter who we had available and it will be even more so now.”