WANDERERS fans have grown accustomed to bemoaning the club’s bad luck with injuries – but Phil Parkinson has banned such talk from his camp.

Over several years there have been plenty of examples of key players forced out of action by unfortunate means, from Stuart Holden’s horrific injury that fateful day in 2011 at Manchester United to the broken ankle which effectively ended Marc Tierney’s footballing career in 2013, to name but a few.

The issues continue to this day, with chairman Ken Anderson estimating recently that around £4million has been paid out in salaries this season to players who have been sidelined.

Darren Pratley, Mark Davies, Max Clayton, Mark Howard and Lawrie Wilson have all required surgery, while Lewis Buxton has also been unable to feature because of a persistent back problem.

Their absence has been magnified by the Football League-enforced embargo, which restricts Wanderers to 24 senior players. But Parkinson is refusing to tell any hard luck stories with a promotion battle still to fight.

“If you continue to harp on about injuries, I think it can cause problems,” explained the Whites boss. “We have definitely had some very, very unlucky injuries – ones you really can’t do anything about.

“Darren’s was an impact injury, Mark’s was studs getting caught in the ground, Mark Howard’s thumb and then the circumstances of Lawrie Wilson’s hamstring were also a little bit freakish.

“But we have to keep overcoming those hurdles. You can’t stay down and fixate on what you don’t have. That is why it has been so important to keep players who have not been in the team ready. I keep saying ‘your time will come’ and when it does, if an injury or a suspension comes along, then it’s down to them to take it.”

The latest long-term casualty is Lawrie Wilson, who had been one of Parkinson’s most consistent players at right-back.

The former Charlton defender will be out until June after undergoing an operation to repair a torn hamstring tendon sustained at MK Dons.

“They think that when he fell and jarred his back early in the game that he might just have affected things further down,” Parkinson explained.

“It was quite a freakish injury to get. You tend to get hamstring problems early in a game or late on if you’re fatigued, but Lawrie was one of our fittest players so we think the fall might have caused it.

“It is a serious injury and the surgeon feels that for Lawrie to get back to where he wants to be the operation is the best way forward.”

Wilson’s absence led to a continental search for a new right-back who was out of contract and close enough to fitness to make a difference in the closing months of the season.

“We had to give ourselves options,” said Parkinson, who has been at pain to point out that a switch to a three-man back line need not be a permanent one.

“It was a balancing act trying to get someone in at this stage because anybody is going to be playing catch up.

“We have scoured Europe – literally everywhere – to find the best option and we had to get it right because, as everyone knows, we have a numbers situation in the squad.”

The one gap in the squad was taken up by Reece Wabara, the 25-year-old former Wigan Athletic full-back who was named in the PFA League One team of the year last season.