Newcastle Eagles flew down to Wales on Friday in readiness to return to SLB Championship action against Cardiff Met Archers on Saturday afternoon. It’s been a torrid couple of weeks for Head Coach Chloe Gaynor and her injury-ravaged squad.

Such was the extent of the injury crisis that the SLB and Manchester Basketball agreed to cancel the Eagles last game as they didn’t have enough players to fill a roster. Fortunately, although still far from back to full strength Newcastle do have enough players to play as Gaynor explained.

“I’d be lying if I said we were healthy, but we have enough players to go out there and give it their best shot. Obviously, we’re still missing Alyssa (Marin) and Alex (Campbell) and Nat (Cernohorska) and myself are long-term injuries.”

“We’re short on numbers but I fully believe in the people that we have available. We lost the Manchester game, and we’ve been lucky enough to reschedule that and would like to thank them for their cooperation with that. But we’ve just to keep rolling with the punches, I guess.

Cardiff have yet to win a game this season having lost all nine games played. That included a 66-62 loss at the Vertu Arena earlier in the season. One of Newcastle’s five wins although themselves have lost their last three games. Gaynor knows it’s going to be a tough game.

“We had a four-point game at home against them and the next week they went to Oaklands and only lost by four. They have been in and around games against teams that should essentially be beating them by more.”

“Stef Collins is a very good coach, and they’ve done well at times. They’ve had a lot of roster changes which has made scouting interesting this week. At the end of the day, it’s the team that turns up on the day and Cardiff always have that fight in them.”

“It’s something that I’ve always respected about them when I’ve played and coached against them and in someways you can’t prepare for that fight. You just have to go out and play against it.”

Been so hamstrung with all the missing players not only matters on game day but means it is difficult to run meaningful and purposeful practices at times to prepare for the game as well as the Coach explained.

“I’ve had that conversation with our team. We have to find a level of consistency. There’s an identity that we have said we are and at times we haven’t matched that with our actions. I’m asking them every day to live towards that identity we’ve all agreed we need to get too.”

“So, this game has to be a real focus point on us striving towards getting to that goal and again it’s about taking it one day at a time. I feel for the girls they’ve had a lot of up and downs with regards to the injuries.”

“It feels like we’re almost adding a new player every week or we’re a different team every week as we’ve always got some available and someone not available. But every team has seasons like this and part of being a professional basketball player and team is how you deal with that.”

“That’s what our essentially young group we haver here is starting to learn and let’s hope we can take that learning into the game against Cardiff and show we’re starting to find the answers.”

The Eagles will tip-off the game at the Cardiff Metropolitan University on Saturday at 1:30pm and the game is free to watch on YouTube.