Cranie recovering from rib injury

Last updated : 10 October 2011 By Covsupport News Service/RD

Coventry City defender Martin Cranie has had a second X-ray on his chest in an attempt to ascertain the extent of his rib injury.

Coventry manager Andy Thorn is hoping that his defender will make a rapid recovery so that he is in contention for a starting place when Nottingham Forest visit The Ricoh on Saturday.

Cranie and Richard Keogh are Thorn's preferred pairing in the centre of his defence and the duo have made an impressive partnership, having one of the best defensive partnerships in the Championship, until Ipswich put three goals past a poor City side three week ago.

Thorn cannot depend on his youngsters to play all of the time and has had to drop Cyrus Christie so he could rest, but that meant Cranie had to move from the centre of defence to right back and it was while playing in that position at Barnsley he injured his ribs and had to be replaced early on in the second half.

The results of the second X-ray have shown that there are no breaks or fractures of Crane's ribs, just bruising which is still sore and painful.

Thorn, speaking to the CT said: “Martin was a big loss up there. He had one X-ray but was still very sore so he went for another, but fortunately nothing is broken and he’s just got heavy bruising so we will see how he is this week.”

Thorn would dearly love to get his Keogh, Cranie partnership back playing as soon as possible and has been disappointed that he has had to chop and change,

He said: “It’s been disappointing because we haven’t had Cranie and Keogh together in recent games and I think that is the strength for us at the moment.

“That’s no disrespect to Nathan Cameron who has come in and done OK, but we had a really good defensive record until I split them up and now we are conceding goals and I don’t like conceding goals, so we’ll have to stop that, but at the moment we just seem to be getting punished for every little thing, but we can’t feel sorry for ourselves.”