NEWPORT County AFC boss Justin Edinburgh is hoping for so overdue good news on the injury front with County’s treatment room once again getting too full for comfort, writes Michael Pearlman.

The Exiles have mounting worries with Byron Anthony, Darren Jones, Ismail Yakubu, Kevin Feely, Andrew Hughes, Max Porter, Danny Crow, Rene Howe and Mark Byrne all missing Tuesday’s clash due to injury, suspension or illness.

That’s a lengthy enough list for any fixture and things didn’t get better throughout the 90 minutes with Mike Flynn and Ryan Jackson both picking up muscular injuries and youngster Aaron Collins forced off on his debut due to concussion.

Byrne and Jones (both illness) and Yakubu (injury) are expected to be fit for Saturday’s clash with AFC Wimbledon, but Edinburgh could well be without Tuesday’s injured trio and will definitely miss the suspended Hughes.

“We lost Michael Flynn with a hamstring and then young Aaron Collins within half an hour of that to concussion, neither of them will be in contention for Saturday now, they’ll be out for a period of time and obviously Andrew Hughes is suspended,” Edinburgh confirmed.

“It was an amazing destruction for us to lose three players to injury during the game and two players through illness before the game, we were lacking in defenders on Tuesday night and it really hurt us.

“We’ll have to assess Ryan Jackson and some of the other players who missed out on Tuesday and we do have mounting injuries, but we’ll have to deal with it because it is part and parcel of football.

“We have no doubt Mark Byrne and Darren Jones will be back from illness, with Ryan Jackson, we were just about to take substitute him but it looks his hamstring has tightened up and is going to be a problem so it’s difficult, but that’s where we are, so we will plan and prepare from there really when we can assess the boys properly.”

Edinburgh hasn’t entirely ruled out an emergency loan signing having allowed Jamie Stephens, Shaun Jeffers, Kyle Patten and Joe Parker to depart the club in recent days, allowing County a little leeway in terms of their budget.

“That may be something we look at considering the position we are in, I’ll look at that in the next couple of days,” he said.

“It is a bit early to comment on that until we have a clearer bigger picture about the players currently unavailable to us.”