Mark Bonner says the U’s must continue to rise to the challenge in Saturday’s showdown with Crawley Town, whatever eleven players he is able to put onto the field of battle.
The likes of Wes Hoolahan, Harvey Knibbs, Adam May, Paul Mullin and Leon Davies are all under the watchful eye of Bonner and his medical/performance staff in the next 48 hours, to establish their availability for the trip to the People’s Pension Stadium.
Despite this though, the U’s Head Coach feels United should show no signs of a dip in their high quality performances, having fully expected the current challenges as a busy fixture schedule begins to make its mark.
He said: “There is going to continue to be challenging periods ahead with the game load we’ve got, and when players are unavailable for certain games or periods, we have to keep finding ways around that.
“It’ll be very difficult for Crawley to guess our team for Saturday because we don’t know what it is yet ourselves. We have to see where a number of players are at, over Thursday and Friday. There’s a few walking wounded from Tuesday night, but that means we can’t stop in finding the most competitive team to put out on the pitch this weekend.”
He continued: “In recent weeks we’ve certainly made changes from game to game, after a really consistent run of selection through the early games of the season. When you have Saturday to Saturday weeks, and you have that time to recover and prepare your team, it was an easy selection for us to maintain that consistency.
“We knew this period was always going to happen. One, because we need to freshen things up but two, because the demand of the games mean people are naturally going to be unavailable for games or even for periods. We’ve always known that was coming this year, hence why you need a solid start to the season.
“As I always say, we need to find the team that can get us to the point on 5pm Saturday, where we can leave Crawley better off than when we arrived.”