WE’RE more like Southend Hospital than Southend United at the moment and it’s certainly not an ideal situation to be in.

The list continues to get longer with Marc Laird and Caolan Lavery both picking up hamstring injuries during Tuesday night’s defeat to Cheltenham Town.

And Kevan Hurst had to miss training yesterday with a viral infection.

We’re not sure at this stage if Kev is going to be available or not.

But knowing our luck at the moment he will take a while to recover and we’ll be short of another influential player.

We’re obviously looking to try to get to the bottom of why we have picked up such a large number of injuries but I would say it was down to the demanding schedule we’ve had.

We’ve had two good cup runs which has added additional games to our league campaign which this year ends in April.

I’ve said before how I find the change in the schedule crazy and playing Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday, Tuesday has resulted in these large number of injuries.

Not having a reserve team doesn’t help either because players suddenly come in from not having played to playing all the time and it’s not a surprise when they then break down.

The reserve league ending like it did at the end of last season makes no sense to me because you want your players on the fringes of things to still be playing to maintain their sharpness.

It’s very odd and something which I think needs to be looked at again.

With so many players being out we have explored the possibility of bringing someone in on loan because there are two areas of the team where we are crying out for reinforcements.

But when you bring in a loan signing you need them to play and we could have some of our injured players back within a week or two.

We therefore have to weigh up what the best option will be and have a real think about things.

However, at the forefront of our minds at the moment is tomorrow’s game against Northampton Town and that will be a very hard game.

They’re a strong side with a good manager and they play to their strengths which makes them tough to beat.

We’re going to have a real go though and battle on with the players we do still have available.

MATCH FIXING IS NOTHING NEW TO FOOTBALL

MATCH fixing has been hitting the headlines again in the last week or so and more of these cases seem to be cropping up now.

But it’s nothing new and one of the biggest nights of my playing career was ruined by a referee taking a bribe.

I was part of the Dundee United side which beat Roma 2-0 in the first leg of the European Cup semi-finals in 1984 but we lost the second leg 3-0, courtesy of some very strange refereeing decisions.

If we had been 4-0 from the first leg I’m sure the second leg would’ve been 5-0 to them and all thought it was weird at the time.

It therefore wasn’t much of a surprise when it later emerged that one of the Roma directors revealed the club had given the referee a bung to sway the match in the favour.

But what I cannot believe and find unfair is that Roma have been allowed to keep their runners up medals and nothing has been done for Dundee United.