On loan Cardiff City midfielder Dakari Mafico has been limited to just 30 minutes of game time by his parent club, according to Yeovil Town boss Billy Rowley.
The 19-year-old has been missing for the Glovers for almost a month due to injury before returning to training with the Glovers this week, but he is not in the squad to face FC Halifax Town at Huish Park.
The club currently have seven players on loan with a limit of only five in the starting XI, meaning Mafico and Burton Albion striker Millar Matthews-Lewis are out.
Explaining the decision to BBC Somerset’s Jack Killah before kick-off, Rowley said: “We have left Dak out today due to the fact that we’ve got we got seven loans in our squad at the moment and we can only obviously use five on a match day. So Dak, because of his injury, he’s only been given a 30-minute protocol through Cardiff, so it probably makes no sense to use him today. Hopefully we can get 45 or 60 minutes out of him next week (at York City).“
Midfielder Jonathon Page is named amongst the substitutes for a second game having been missing for a month and defender Joy Mukena, who came on as a half-time substitute in the 2-1 defeat at Eastleigh with on Easter Monday and then going off with a reoccurrence of a hamstring injury, starts having recovered from the knock.
2.45PM UPDATE: Defender Kyle Ferguson has left the pre-match warm-up at Huish Park with what appears to be an injury, meaning there is likely to be a change to the starting XI before kick-off. It looks as if Harvey Greenslade is coming in with Finn Cousin-Dawson moving in to the defence in a last-minute reshuffle.
The game is almost the dictionary definition of a dead rubber for both sides with Yeovil mathematically safe from relegation and Halifax relying on an almighty slip-up from Southend United to sneak in to the play-off places.
Asked how he was motivating his side, Rowley said: “The supporters were a massive factor in the (team) talk today. They have been so good in the past couple of weeks and were incredible at Eastleigh. They want us they want us to come here and just fight for every yard, every inch, and every point we can and that’s the message for the lads, we want to finish strong. I think the challenge for us, we’re going to try and get like five or six points out of these last three games. You would imagine (next weekend’s trip to title-chasing) York is kind of a free hit, but we want to win today and we want to win against Solihull on the last day.”
“It is really difficult (for Halifax) because of how well they’ve done this season, but I hope that they’re a bit edgy and they’re really dthinking deeply about ‘what ifs.’ We just need to go and play the game in front of us and hopefully we deliver.”