Kilmarnock are sweating the fitness of defender Joe Wright after he was sent to hospital following a worrying head-knock against Rangers.
The centre-back went down in the first half of the 6-0 defeat and initially returned to the pitch to play on, but had to be hooked moments later with fears of a concussion. He was sent to hospital for scans and boss Derek McInnes, whose defensive injuries are mounting, is hoping to have him back to face Dundee United this weekend. But it’s a case of playing the waiting game.
He said: “Wright went to hospital for a scan, so we need to wait and see. We weren’t even allowed to use that as a concussion sub. We wanted to get Marley Watkins off at the end but it seemed like we didn’t notify the referee quick enough, but we need to wait and see how Joe is. Obviously with Stuart Findlay’s injury and one or two other issues we’ve got with injuries it would be good if we could get it all clear on that one for the weekend.”
The 6-0 hammering, courtesy of five different Rangers scorers, was the latest damaging result for Killie who have been dragged into the relegation mire. They now have the worst defensive record in the league with 33 conceded and have kept just one clean sheet in 15 games. It’s been a dramatic departure from last season when they conceded just 44 all campaign, and McInnes doesn’t know how to explain it.
“I don’t know (what is behind it),” he said. “I do think Stuart Findlay is a massive loss for us, I’ll be honest with that, but we can’t harp on about that, we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got to deal with. We’ve always tried to go quite positive, we get the benefit of going with two wide players, two strikers, and in the main we’ve tried to do that.
“There is a trade-off with that. when you come up against teams that play a bit more direct and the better teams, you have to then be able to cope and defend man for man a lot of the time. Unfortunately for us, we’ve not done it with the same confidence or aggressive manner to try and stop your opponent playing and getting opportunities.
“I think we’ve become just a wee bit too easy to play against. We were alright in the game, but the first goal is important, especially here when Rangers are coming off the back of a bit of scrutiny and you don’t want to give them a leg up, and we spoke about that.
“We go as we are, we’ve got some better games, obviously the imbalance of playing away games to home games has been quite pivotal, and we need to start being a team who can cope away from home and back to being a winning team at home again” .