KENNY MacDONALD
Baffled boss Peter Murphy told how he was going to spend days to solve the “conundrum” of THREE first half hamstring injuries to Queen of the South players.
The Doonhamers fought out a 1-1 home draw with high flying Alloa despite being forced into a trio of substitutions.
They actually finished the first half with 10 men following the third crocked player, Kai Kennedy, pulling up minutes before the break.
Murphy lost Brennan Dickenson and Pharrell Willis within the space of five first half minutes and before the match had gone 20 minutes.
He said: “It’s freak injuries.
“I have never seen anything like that before, not so early.
“I will be thinking about this all weekend about how and why that may have happened.
“I may wake up at three or four in the morning about this.
“Was it the preparation? Was it the 5.30pm kick off and the preparation with the players sitting around all day.
“If we have another 5.30pm kick off, which we do in a few weeks up at Arbroath and with that travelling, do we then have to make the players do something earlier in the morning? And maybe go for a walk or something. These things go through your head.
“We will try and mitigate that in the future because that cannot happen again.”
After the dust settled on the Saturday night encounter, Murphy declared he was satisfied with a point that took the Wasps top of the table courtesy of rivals Cove losing 2-1 at home to Inverness Caley.
He said: “Overall I think a draw was a good result and a fair result, especially with the amount of injuries that we got.
“I felt after the injures and subs I felt we were a bit dis-organised for a period but managed to get that back and (remember) Alloa are a very good side in this division. But we changed the shape and immediately after we changed the shape we got the goal from Josh Walker.
“It was a great finish and you saw earlier in the sseason at Cove Rangers when he came on that he changed the game then as well. So he has that and can impact a game.
“Now with Kai Kennedy’s injury it might be that Josh gets a lot more opportunities.
“I felt sorry for the rest of the substitutes on the bench because we were forced into making substitutions.
“Pharrell and Kai look like they will be out longer, a few weeks maybe, but longer than Brennan who was taken off more as a precaution.
“It’s strange because before the game we said it’s great that it is the first time this season that we have everybody to choose from. Then within half an hour, or 20 minutes. there’s two injuries. It’s crazy.
“You look at your training. But we did less coverage this week than last week and not by a lot so there is nothing that has really changed.”
Murphy reckoned Alloa’s opener came from a foul on Reece Lyon and added: “I think the player won the ball in the first instance and Reece was still in a position to get it but was held back. There was a few strange decisions.”