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Brian Dutton: Injury clouds Walsall comeback win

Walsall’s comeback EFL Trophy win over Chelsea U21’s has been overshadowed by a potentially serious injury to Callum Cockerill-Mollett.

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The 20-year-old left-back went down injured after blocking a shot within the first 10 minutes of Walsall’s 3-2 win.

Chelsea were 1-0 up at the time of the incident through Tariq Lamptey and the right-back added a second while Walsall were preparing Kory Roberts to replace Cockerill-Mollett.

The defender was seen limping off with the help of physios.

Walsall eventually came back in the second half to win 3-2, through goals by Caolan Lavery, Wes McDonald and Dan Scarr.

But assistant manager Brian Dutton said that the injury could potentially be a hairline fracture.

“There’s no early diagnosis but it doesn’t look great,” he said.

“There’s rumours that it could be as bad as a hairline fracture.

“That’s worse case scenario, so figures crossed that it’s not that and it’s something a little bit less serious.

“It’s a case of waiting to get assessed once everything calms down.

“Hopefully good news in the future, fingers crossed for him.”

The Saddlers had a dismal start to the game with Cockerill-Mollett’s injury and conceding two early goals.

And Dutton says manager Darrell Clarke was less than pleased at half-time.

“The gaffer has gone in there and he’s been very blunt with the guys,” he added.

“It wasn’t acceptable, the first half performance.

“There wasn’t much tactical talking, it was more a case of ‘listen lads, you got us in this mess, you have to pull yourselves out of it - go and show us what you can do second half.’

“That was it in a nutshell.

“To be fair to the lads, they’ve rolled their sleeves up second half and they’ve represented the badge honorably.

“Hopefully it’s a springboard”

Goalscoring hero Scarr added the winning strike in added time and the centre-back insists they need to start games much better.

“We can’t start games like that,” he said.

“The first 15, 20 minutes, it took us a while to get going and get to grips with what they were doing.

“We can’t give ourselves the scope to get back from that, we need to start better.

“We had a talking to at half-time and picked it up.

“Then we did what we should have done from the start to the game.

“Get in their faces.

“They wanted to play nice 23’s football so we should have got into them and once we did that I don’t think they really knew what to do really.”