Jones hopeful Rea's injury isn't too serious

The 24-year-old, who has captained the side with Alan Sheehan on the bench in recent weeks, needed treatment inside the opening five minutes after appearing to hurt himself in a tackle.

He carried on for another 20 minutes, but was then on his haunches again, eventually trudging off to be replaced by Jorge Grant with Pelly-Ruddock Mpanzu dropping into the holding role.

Speaking afterwards, Jones said: “He just tweaked the outside of his knee a little bit.

“He tried to play on because he’s a warrior in everything he does, hopefully it won’t be too serious, it’s just opening it up, and we’ll see.

“I thought when he came on, Jorge was excellent and Pelly was superb in that role.

“We’ve showed that we can adapt to that, but Glen’s been brilliant, he was a miss because of what we gives us all over the pitch.

“There’s not too many negatives, we hope it’s not too serious, we’ll get on our knees and pray tonight that he’s fine.”

When asked why he opted for Grant ahead of Sheehan for the switch, Jones continued: “We had the thing of putting Pelly there and putting JJ into the midfield area and putting (Dan) Potts on as we have those good options.

“Luke Berry straight on too, but I wanted to continue to play the same way, so I didn’t want to have too much disruption.

“I brought Pelly back in as he does that well, Jorge Grant gives us that fluency in midfield as he’s a wonderful, wonderful footballer, he’s been training at a really good level.

“With the two wide men they had, JJ (James Justin) handled (Marcus) Harness superbly well, who’s a good player, but JJ was superb against them.”

Team-mate Justin was disappointed to see Rea have to leave the field, but hopes he will be back available for the trip to Scunthorpe on Boxing Day.

He added: "It’s nice to have Jorge on the bench to come in and it doesn’t weaken our side at all.

"Obviously it's not nice to lose out on Glen, hopefully he’ll be fine for the next few games, but we’ll see.

"We’ve got lots of strength in depth here and whoever comes in in his place will do well.

“Glen’s a trooper, anyone who knows him, he’ll go through a brick wall for his team-mates and it's just nice to have him as our skipper."