WE had a big blow last week when we lost defender Chris Greenman with a dislocated shoulder.

It is a tragedy for Chris, particularly as the injury stemmed from a fairly innocuous training ground incident.

We are looking at him being out for six weeks, in addition to the long spell he had out with his knee injury, and you have to feel for him.

Chris' return has been one of the major reasons why we have tightened up defensively in recent weeks.

With Micky Cotter coming into the side at the same time, it has been two new faces to put into the dressing room and I am sure we have got something from that. It would be nice to drop another couple of faces in and keep us on our toes.

He has worked damn hard to get himself back to fitness, and to suffer a different injury must be very depressing for him.

But we have to get on with our job and he has to get on with his, which is to recover his fitness as quickly as possible.

It was disappointing to have Saturday's home Dr Martens League Premier Division game with Dorchester Town called off.

I can probably understand why and the reason was right, but we were looking forward to possibly getting some more league points on the board.

League games in October and November are few and far between if progress is made in the cups, and by not playing on Saturday we went down three places.

I would sooner have points in the bag than games in hand, and with Dorchester playing Wigan in the FA Cup this weekend, this might have been a decent time to play them.

Planning for Monday's Dr Martens Cup clash with Blakenall became further disrupted on the back of the postponement, in that if we had performed reasonably well and didn't repeat the Hampton episode, I would have wanted to have a look at a few different situations.

But we still managed to give Chris Jefferson his first-team debut, and he did well and took his goal well, giving him two in one full game and 15 minutes in the Worcestershire Senior Cup win over Halesowen.

I am sure, as with most of the young players, he wants to play more and I think this is where the midweek Central Conference falls down in that it is about three teams short.

But the young players have to be patient and the opportunity to play has to be right for them to make an impact.

I thought we ran out comfortable winners in the end, and it was also useful in that we got Martin Weir and Carl Tranter back into the play as substitutes late in the game following their recent injuries.

We have now lost only one of our last nine games. Not many of those have been league games, but as with last year we have taken something from our cup results in terms of getting accustomed to the winning habit.

Hopefully we can go to Stafford Rangers this Saturday with some confidence although it will be a tough game.

They have come up and acquitted themselves quite well, including a 4-2 win at St George's Lane back in August, when we were more than disappointed with our own performance.

They had a very good 2-2 draw at leaders Crawley on Saturday, so they will be in decent fettle for the game.

But we will have confidence ourselves going into the game, and it is a good one to get our teeth into. It should be an interesting contest.