Mark Cooper has said that he is hopeful that he will be able to call upon four or five of his most experienced players in the coming weeks after injury,.
Speaking to BBC Radio Somerset’s Josh Perkins ahead of the game this weekend, he said he was grateful to how the younger, newer players were adapting to life in Green and White, but that he hopes more players will be available soon.
“Well, I spoke about this, [the new recruits ] are all young lads that bring something different, so they’re trying to make their way in the game. So for us to try and replace Jake Wannell, Aaron Jarvis, Morgan Williams. Michael Smith, James Plant, Sean McGurk, to try and replace those players like for like, is impossible at this stage of the season in terms of experience. So the only other route is to try and get younger players that are making their way in the game, desperate to get some game time, and they bring something different, but at the moment, they’re learning the game, so they will make mistakes, and sometimes they’ll be better coming off the bench.
Through circumstance, they more or less all that to play last week against Boston and and it was a tough environment for them to play in, not a nice nice environment, and that knocks their confidence.
Then Boston go to a team in the playoffs and score three there. So it’s a tough environment. So we have to be careful with them, but until we get more frontline players back, we have to give them all the support we can and trying to put them in the right position, in the right times, so they can really help too.”
As for when we might expect players to return, we are now into waiting “weeks” rather than “months” before we get players back from the physio room.
“It’s day to day, really, where you know, every time the physio rings me, I’m frightened to death to answer it, because you know somebody else is going to be up for six weeks. This is just a moment in time. It happens at certain teams, in certain seasons that you look at Tottenham all of their top players were injured. And that affects, it really affects and we just got to ride it out, and hopefully Wannell and Smith may be back in the next few days. Then we’ve been looking at Jarvis and Williams probably within a couple of weeks. So yeah, so hopefully there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
On Solihull, who the Glovers come up against on Saturday, Mark Cooper said that they, like us, had been through plenty of change this season and that it is guaranteed to be a tough fixture.
“They’ve had lots of change, obviously, change of the Manager [who] went to the EFL to Barrow, done a great job.
They brought in Matty [Taylor] from Wealdstone. It’s always tough, when you go into a team that are used to a manager’s way, you have to try and change and adapt to the way you want it.
They’ve had a turn around of players, they’ve had some injuries, so it’s been tough, but they’ve had a little run, I think, three unbeaten. Like I always say, there’s never any easy games at this level, never. And we’re expecting a really tough game, but I’m sure they would have watched us against York, and they’ll be expecting a really tough encounter as well.”
This Saturday marks Non-League day in the UK and few managers have had the level of success outside the EFL than Mark Cooper and he said that it represents the ‘lifeblood’ of the game in this country.
“If I give my experience, Dan Burn was a non-league player at Darlington, when I was a manager, I gave him his debut at 16, and I actually did an interview saying that he would play for England one day. I didn’t actually probably mean it at the time, but we were trying to raise his fee for when we sold him.
But that the game is littered with stories like that, of how many players have gone into non league to get some experience or have started in on me? So it’s vital that that it is celebrated. It’s just a shame that there’s not, there’s not as much funding coming down the pyramid as probably there should be, when you see how much money there is at the top end of the game with the Premier League and the wages.
I know once you’re once you’re in there, turkeys are not going to vote for Christmas are they? You know, they’re not going to vote to drip down more money down the pyramid. But I think we have to look at it and say, you realise where the actual lot of talent does come from. I give you actually.”