Brian Davey hopes Knaresborough Town are on their way to putting their injury problems behind them
Knaresborough Town manager Brian Davey can be forgiven for ignoring calls to his mobile phone at the moment.
A crippling injuries and suspensions list has caused Knaresborough’s season to hit the buffers in recent weeks – a seven game run without a win came to an end at Yorkshire Amateur on Tuesday night.
“I’m always fearing the worst when the phone goes because it is never anyone ringing up to say” ‘I’d like to play for you and play for nothing’, Davey told Non League Yorkshire.
“Nick Radcliffe rang me on Tuesday morning to say his work had sent him to London so I lost him for the Yorkshire Amateur game.”
Colin Heath (hamstring), Liam Gray (hospitalised with food poisoning), Hilliard Serrao (knee), Joel Freeston (foot), Blaine Hobson and Matt Donnelly are just some of the players who have been sidelined with injury recently.
Graham Whitehead and Byron Littlefair have also missed games in the last month because of holidays.
Their problems had a knock-on effect to their league form and sent them tumbling down the Toolstation NCEL Division One table.
Davey said: “Any team would get knocked if you have lost the amount of players we have lost.
“Once the season has started and people are settled, it’s very hard to get people to come in.
“If you have three or four out you can deal with it, but when you have more out, it does stop you.
“If you have your Liam Grays, Colin Heaths missing, it makes it difficult.
“It’s just a string of bad luck. If you bring all them players back in, look how strong we would be.”
Knaresborough will head to unbeaten Clipstone tomorrow with their confidence back after the 1-0 win at the Ammers and Davey is hopeful that the corner has been turned.
“Well September is usually about things settling down with squads and rotations, but we were in a situation where we were just trying our best to put a 14 out,” he added.
“Now we went to Yorkshire Amateur with three subs and without a couple of players. We’re heading in the right direction.
“We go to Clipstone tomorrow and they’re probably one of the best sides in the league.
“They have won all their six games, but I expect us to go there and do as well as we can and we’ll see if we can keep the momentum going.”