Melbourne Victory's bid to get its faltering A-League season back on track has received another blow with Costa Rican playmaker Carlos Hernandez to miss up to a month with a torn quad.
The loss of the attacking midfielder is a huge setback for Melbourne and leaves the Victory's squad down to the bare bones for Friday night's daunting trip to Adelaide to take on the Asian Champions League finalists.
Melbourne has already lost three of its past four matches to surrender top spot in the table to Adelaide with the 2006/07 champions actually slipping to third following last week's 2-0 loss at home to Sydney.
But now they have to travel to an Adelaide side facing up to its 11th game in 50 days on Friday night with Hernandez sidelined as well as suspended duo Archie Thompson and Ney Fabiano plus Nathan Elasi and Sebastian Ryall, who are away on young Socceroos duties.
Elasi would have been the preferred candidate to play up front alongside Danny Allsopp with Thompson, Fabiano - who serves the last match of his six game ban for spitting this week - and now Hernandez all sidelined.
With only veteran Tom Pondeljak left to play alongside Allsopp, the Victory will call up one of their youth players to make the trip to Adelaide and to provide some additional firepower with Mathew Theodore and Aziz Behich in contention to come into the squad.
Melbourne Victory football operations manager Gary Cole admitted on Tuesday the loss of Hernandez meant the club's range of attacking options was as threadbare as any time in the club's history.
"I think so - with a couple of injuries and the red cards and with Nathan and Sebastian away as well," he said.
"It means we are light on but it means there are opportunities for other people to stand up."
Cole said despite the Victory's lack of attacking options this week, he was confident his team could still get a result at in-form Adelaide despite Melbourne having failed to score in three of its past four matches.
"We just had a review of last week's game and while we were disappointing in the first half we still had 24 opportunities in behind their defence for the game," he said.
"That says we still got some good balls in there but there wasn't enough quality to it and we didn’t get enough people in the box and that is what this week's sessions have been all about - getting more people in the box more often and a bit better quality balls in there and if we can do that we will be competitive."