David Artell has credited his Crewe Alexandra players with the way they have physically and mentally coped with the fixture demand. Crewe are preparing for their fifth mid-week fixture on the bounce with a tricky encounter at Oxford tomorrow night.
The re-arranged match at the Kassam Stadium will be the first of four straight away games for the Railwaymen and Artell is pleased with the conditioning of his players.
Ahead of the game with the U’s, the Crewe boss stated: “The recovery of the players is vitally important because we are playing Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday but have been doing that for a number of weeks now.
“We have Oxford this Tuesday, are then travelling to Portsmouth and then have two more away games at Accrington and then Cheltenham in the FA Cup.
“It does have an impact on the training and the development of the players. The ones that are not playing as regularly are still getting their development in but it is tougher for the ones that are. They are being asked to play three times a week but I haven’t seen any evidence of them struggling physically.
“They just crack on and get on with it and I’m sure it has been the same for everyone.
“We saw an opportunity to rest a few of them against Shrewsbury in the EFL Trophy and they didn’t do much on the Monday and had the Wednesday off as well, so he didn’t take anything out of their legs.”