Good news for Luton as Ashby's groin injury isn't as bad as first feared

Hatters boss Jack Wilshere was pleased to have some good news to report regarding the injury suffered by on-loan Newcastle United full back Harrison Ashby at the weekend.

The 24-year-old, who has struggled at times with various problems during his career to date, gave a wonderful display against Stockport a week ago, before staying in the team for Saturday’s 1-1 draw with Leyton Orient. However, he was forced to hobble off after just 21 minutes of the contest at Kenilworth Road holding his groin, as it looked like the ex-West Ham United youngster was due to have an extended spell on the sidelines.

Thankfully, that doesn’t appear to be the case, as despite potentially missing tomorrow night’s trip to Stevenage, giving an update this afternoon, Wilshere said: “Harrison is actually better than we thought. He did a little bit today, so we’re waiting for him. We’ll have to see if he’s available, maybe because it’s the Thursday night (he might not play), I think definitely if it was Saturday, so we have to weigh up the risk. If we select him tomorrow, how much of a risk is that we lose him long term, but good news because it’s never great when they go off like that.

“It’s pleasing for me and the coaches and the team, but probably more importantly for Harrison, because I saw how frustrated he was when he came off the pitch. I know he’s had a little bit of that throughout his career where he’s just started to get going and he’s had a setback. He obviously had a little setback in pre-season which wasn’t bad, but it knocked him off his flow and he’s definitely a player who needs that. He needs that consistency of training and playing games, so good for us but also really good for him.”

While Ashby is possibly in contention for the trip to Hertfordshire, one player who isn’t is academy graduate Benny Benagr, the teenager to be given some time to recover from his hamstring problem. Wilshere added: “No, not yet, Benny needs a little bit more time. We’re going to take our time with this one as we need to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

"The demands from him, physically and mentally, emotionally, going from playing in the 21s and then being all of a sudden the star boy for the first team and playing loads of minutes, that’s not always easy to cope with. So we need to make sure that we make him robust, we make him strong in other areas, and we’ll use this time to do that.”