Jim Jefferies has offered an insight into the difficulties facing him at Dunfermline Athletic by insisting that he has only 12 senior outfield players at his disposal.
A combination of the club being in administration and a signing ban on players aged 21 and over has ensured the manager has little scope to bolster a squad scalped of seven first team players in March.
"Our numbers might look like 20 or 22 but a lot of these boys are last season's under-20 squad and they weren't playing until the end of the season," he explained. "Some are 16 and 17 years of age but we will lose the under 20s squad for this season because of the cost factor.
"So in terms of first-team players, we have 12 outfield players and two goalkeepers. I have drawn up a list of positions we need to strengthen but the problem is we need trial games as quickly as possible to have a look and see if they are good enough."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article