Sheffield Wednesday are helping Ernie Weaver through his programme at current.

Sheffield Wednesday are hopeful that Ernie Weaver has no reaction from a troublesome foot that has prompted them to manage his workload this season.

The young defender was one of the more experienced players in a midweek run-out against Accrington Stanley earlier this week, a match that served as only his 17th senior appearance. Last season he was one of the Owls academy figures to impress in moments of a difficult Championship campaign but saw his progress halted when in October he suffered a serious recurrence of a foot injury.

Amid the availability struggles of more senior figures he started the last two matches of Henrik Pedersen’s Wednesday management stint and is looking to stay in contention under Dave Challinor - though the new Owls boss revealed there are ongoing niggles with the foot issue that are having to be carefully managed through the week.

“I think you look at him and Gab have played a lot of football and probably a lot of football last year,” Challinor told The Star. “And sometimes expectation can be that because they played in the Championship last year that they cruise League One - it's not as easy as that.

“Ernie in particular is struggling on the back of the foot injury he had last year. He's still having some issues with that. So we have had to be careful.

“He's probably gotten into a rhythm where he plays games and then misses a few days training and it becomes about that, to let his foot settle down a bit. We still need to get to the bottom of that. So we are sort of a little bit trial and error to a certain degree. He was a little bit sore after the game on Sunday. He was scanned yesterday and there's no issue there which I think for him was really good in terms of peace of mind. He wanted to play (against Accrington).”

Weaver has been close to at least two National League loan switches in recent weeks, with The Star of the understanding that a number of fifth tier clubs are keeping tabs on his situation should he become available moving forward. The likes of Liam Cooper and Ricardo Santos are set to return from injury and Sil Swinkels has served a suspension following his stop-start return from injury.

Asked for an initial appraisal on the youngster, Challinor said: “I thought second half he did really, really well apart from the one mistake where he jumped in and then we can see the goal as a consequence. So he's still a young defender, he's still making those mistakes. He just needs to find the consistency within that.

“I suppose every football club want to have players that come through the system and make an impact on the first team and there will be high hopes for Ernie in terms of what that looks like. So hopefully there's no issues (with his foot) and he'll still be around the first team and involved at the weekend.”