Cardiff City: Barry-Murphy says illness has swept through squad

Head coach Brian Barry-Murphy has revealed how illness has swept through his Cardiff City squad, potentially ruling out at least three infected players.

Defenders Joel Bagan, Calum Chambers and Will Fish are all doubts for the match against Exeter City on Boxing Day (1500 GMT) due to the virus that Barry-Murphy says is “quickly” spreading throughout the League One club.

In addition, the Bluebirds could still be without injured goalkeeper Nathan Trott (hand) and midfielder David Turnbull (groin) for the game at the Cardiff City Stadium, having already been without long-term absentee Rubin Colwill because of an ankle problem.

“We have some fitness concerns around several members of our squad, so we are really just checking on the wellbeing of those guys,” said Barry-Murphy.

“Calum Chambers went home today with illness. He follows Will Fish, who has been sick and Joel Bagan. So we’ve had a virus.

“I think there’s been a lot of sickness around in general over the past few weeks and once you get one or two members of staff and players, the history suggests other players quickly tend to follow suit – that’s been the case.

“We’ve done a lot of travelling in the past seven days and when you’re so close to each other on on the coach for so long, I think it’s pretty normal that it spreads pretty quickly.

“We’re trying to minimise that cause of more people getting infected, but will train for the next couple of days and see how we’re fixed to pick a team.

“Nathan Trott hasn’t trained yet. David Turnbull has a groin issue… on what has become, very quickly, quite a long list of doubts for the game on Friday.

“Will Fish was ill at the game on Saturday [against Lincoln], the same for Joel Bagan, so those guys are almost three days ahead of Calum Chambers and we haven’t seen them train yet, so hopefully they can make an appearance today [23 December] or on Christmas Day of some sort and we’ll see if they can be available.

“We have enough players to cope no matter what so we’ll be fine.”

Barry-Murphy is at least feeling more positive on the recovery of Colwill, who damaged ankle ligaments in November and fellow midfielder Eli King who is recovering from an anterior cruciate ligament injury:

“I’ve just been in the gym with Rubin and Eli,” added Barry-Murphy.

“Both are making exceptionally good progress and it’s really good to see Ruben’s ankle is looking really good and although he’s in the very early stages of recovery, the early stages are very promising and I’m very pleased with that one actually.”