The Shrimps’ physiotherapy team provide an update on long-term injured players Jon Obika, Jonah Ayunga and André Filipe Da Silva Mendes.
In what has been a busy opening month of the season for the medical team, first-team physios Simon Farnworth and Oliver Howse recently sat down and explained where abouts the injured lads are in terms of their recovery.
Summer signing Obika ruptured his bicep femoris, the main hamstring located on the outside of the leg, in a pre-season outing against Burnley, whilst Jonah Ayunga picked up a knee injury in our Carabao Cup Round One victory over Blackburn Rovers.
Howse admits that, despite the freak nature of his injury, Obika is making good progress.
“Since the last update, he’s had his brace off so he’s walking more normally,” he said.
“We’re getting him in the pool moving as well, so he’s progressing well.
“We’ve just got to keep working with him and his plan and working with the surgeons as well and the specialists.”
Former Bristol Rovers man Ayunga is recovering well from knee surgery, an operation that Howse says went smoothly.
He added: “[Jonah’s] operation went well, he had the stitches out on Monday.
“We had him on a little compex device, more commonly known as a tense machine, so we’ve got him working on that with the quads and hamstrings so we can actually do some movements.
“[The surgery] was about 11 days ago, so we started rehab on Tuesday, and we wanted to test to see if there’s any differences between the quads and hamstrings.
“The little device I was using gives us peak force so we can actually look at what each muscle on each side is actually producing to give us an idea if there’s any differences, which there was with Jonah and we’d fully expect that post-op, especially at this stage, and that’s what we have to try and correct.”
Young goalkeeper Da Silva Mendes fractured the scaphoid bone in his hand in a training ground injury sustained towards the latter stages of last season.
Speaking of the Portuguese man’s recovery, Farnworth explained: “He had an operation to have the scaphoid bone pinned and he’s in a light plaster now.
“Because of that, he’s out for quite a long time, he’ll be in plaster for at least six to eight weeks and then they’ll remove the wire that’s in there holding it in situ, and then he’ll come back and will have to strengthen his hand up.”
Despite being a goalkeeper and injuring his hand, Farny admits that training can still resume irrespective of the obvious restrictions.
Farnworth added: “What we can do in the meantime is what we’re doing now, we can do a lot of fast feet, obviously being a goalkeeper that’s important to him.
“We also do a lot of speed work so he can get used to coming off his line, so we just keep him ticking over from a cardiovascular point of view and obviously being a goalkeeper, keeping his feet quite fast.”