Team news as Stoke City make the mid-week Championship trip to Huddersfield Town

Ki-Jana Hoever is expected to be available for Stoke City’s midweek match against Huddersfield Town. However, Alex Neil is still set to be without at least three more key players after a difficult injury-plagued start to the season.

When Stoke City traveled to Norwich on Saturday, Hoever was an unexpected absence, and Mehdi Leris was asked to step in at right-back, with deadline-day acquisition Junior Tchamadeu making his debut as a substitute in the dying minutes. The 21-year-old, who is on loan from Wolves for the season, was on international duty with the Netherlands under-21s last week and is expected to return soon.

“I didn’t realise he was going to be (out) until (Friday),” Neil admitted after the game at Carrow Road. “He couldn’t train yesterday.” We received a scan. It will not be a long-term solution. We’ll put him on the list for the next game.”

Stoke, on the other hand, will most certainly go to Huddersfield on Wednesday without two starting attackers, Andre Vidigal and Ryan Mmaee, as well as left-back Enda Stevens. Summer signing Vidigal, who has already shown game-changing potential in the Championship, suffered an ankle injury late on at Millwall, while Mmaee, who joined from Hungary champions Ferencvaros to lead the line, suffered a hamstring injury almost immediately after scoring his first goal for the club in a cup win over Rotherham.

Left-back Stevens picked up a calf injury while on international duty with Republic of Ireland against France. Lynden Gooch, another deadline day signing, made his first start at left-back. Emerging midfielder Sol Sidibe was not involved on Saturday after suffering with illness while away with England under-17s in Spain.

Neil said at Norwich: “It doesn’t help that we’re missing both first choice full-backs, doesn’t help that we’re missing Vidigal, that Mmaee is missing. We’ve got that to contend with but there are a lot of teams in the league with all kinds of things to contend with. The one thing that’s different about us than anybody else is the fact that we’re replacing changes with new changes.

“I mean, whereas other teams have had some kind of continuity with the team and the fact that they’ve been together for maybe six months, 12 months, 18 months, or even a few years in some cases, we’re basically trying to bond a brand new squad together.” When some of the new lads you brought in leave, you replace them with other new lads.

“For Junior that’s his first minutes in the league, first minutes for the club, Leris and Burger were making their first away starts. So I thought it was really encouraging considering we’ve put a lot of new lads together and how they performed. I thought it was good, but obviously I prefer to play poorly and win.”

Neil – never keen to give away too much concerning injuries – did give hope, however, that he would have a full squad soon enough.

“I think we’ll get some good results,” he told StokeonTrentLive. “We’ll be fine. I’ve got no worries about us at all. It’s an element of getting consistency with the starting XI, getting consistency with people being available and making sure we don’t have to change too much too often – and I think once we get to that point, which I’m hoping is going to be quite soon, we can keep performing like that and we’ll be more than fine.”