The yellow cards picked up by Francisco Sierralta and Hassane Kamara on Saturday mean they miss tomorrow night’s home game with Reading at Vicarage Road, which creates further team selection problems for head coach Slaven Bilic.

With Craig Cathcart and Samuel Kalu returning to the squad, Bilic does have fresh options but the absence of Kamara is a particular problem as other than James Morris – who only has 14 minutes of Championship football under his belt – there is no ready-made left-back option.

“Yeah, the suspensions are a problem that is made worse by the fact that we are already missing players,” said Bilic.

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“We should have Cathcart and Kalu involved again, and Kabasele is back and has been on the bench and played some minutes.

“We were short of right backs, then it was central defenders, then strikers, now it’s left-footed defenders.

“We’re going to find a solution. It’s not ideal, we’ll have to make changes but we have a solution that will be good enough to cover for Kamara.

“Kamara is also a very honest player. His stats are very good, and other than young James Morris we don’t have a natural replacement.

“He also needs a bit of break so while it’s not an ideal situation to be in, on the other hand he will be well rested for the trip to Bristol.”

Reflecting on Saturday’s defeat at the hands of Coventry, Bilic again reiterated that his side did not make the most of the time they spent in and around the final third of the pitch.

“It’s not all about possession because sometimes possession can be useless because you have the ball far away from goal,” he said.

“But on Saturday we had the ball where it matters more, and the same against Cardiff, but in both games we didn’t create enough chances.

“We did everything well until the last pass or the last ball. What few chances we did create we should have scored but we didn’t.

“What we can do is to encourage the players to do more of it and get more bodies into the box.”

Having had such an awful set of result at Vicarage Road last season, could there still be a hangover even now, and even after the win over Luton?

“It would be easy to say there is still some nervousness in home games because of what happened, but I don’t think that’s the case,” said Bilic.

“It actually doesn’t matter what the cause is, the main thing is to keep believing in the way we are playing.

“We’re not a team that can just chuck the ball into the box and hope that a good bounce is going to come. We’re not that kind of team and we don’t have those kind of players.

“To create more chances we need good movement and good actions from the players, and we are doing that. We lack the cutting edge, and for me that is down to sharpness.

“You need proper sharpness and quick reactions, and some of the players are fatigued. That’s not an excuse, it’s just how it is.

“So we just have to get through these couple of games coming up.”