New Owls boss Dave Challinor plans to be ‘careful’ with his team selection in the coming weeks regarding players returning from injury.

Sheffield Wednesday have a busy fixture schedule coming up, with six games between now and the end of the month. It means Challinor will get lots of opportunities to watch his side in competitive action but perhaps not as much training time as he would like.

One of the talking points from their season so far has been injuries, resulting in a lack of consistency in team selection, particularly at centre-back, with Ricardo Santos, Di’Shon Bernard, Liam Cooper, Liam Palmer, Ernie Weaver, Gabriel Otegbayo and Sil Swinkels all having been used.

A trip to Oldham Athletic on Sunday in the FA Cup is followed by an EFL Trophy home clash against Accrington Stanley on Wednesday before another game at S6 on Saturday against Plymouth Argyle. With that in mind, Challinor expects to rotate, especially players who have had long-term injuries like Bernard and Santos.

He said: “After Sunday, some of the lads will go away on international duty. So that might influence what we do on Wednesday. There are obviously (EFL Trophy) restrictions and rules that we need to stick to with Wednesday's team, but we have to look a little bit further ahead based around what Plymouth will look like from our perspective. So we'll make a judgment after Sunday around what that looks like.

“We've obviously got players coming back. If we were looking at Rico and Dish, no way you want to play them back-to-back on Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday with the running Tuesday fixtures we've got coming up. So we have to be a little bit careful with what we're picking.”

The two cup matches should give Challinor a reasonable look at the squad before fifth-placed Plymouth come to Hillsborough for what will be Challinor’s first league game in charge.

“We will get a view on some players,” he told The Star. “There are obviously some players that are still out, but not too far away, and they'll be massively important to us over the coming weeks. So the sooner we can see them out there training on the grass with the rest of the group, the better for everyone.”