NEIL WARNOCK is hoping Britt Assombalonga has not become the latest Middlesbrough striker to succumb to a long-term injury problem.

With Ashley Fletcher set to be sidelined for up to four months with a serious ankle issues, Boro’s failure to bring in a new forward ahead of last Friday’s domestic transfer deadline means Warnock’s attacking resources are extremely stretched.

The situation worsened on Saturday when Assombalonga complained of soreness in the first half of his side’s goalless draw with Reading and was withdrawn at the interval.

Warnock did not want to take any risks with his side due to travel to Bristol City tomorrow before heading to Cardiff City at the weekend, and while he is hoping his skipper’s problem is not too serious, he concedes it is a worry given the lack of alternatives in his squad.

“He was a bit stiff, and we’ve got three games in a week,” said Warnock. “Ideally, I’d want him to play a full game on Tuesday. I thought Britt struggled a bit on the sprinting, so I just had a chat with him at half-time and said, ‘Look, any problem, we can’t have another Ashley Fletcher. I’d rather you just come off now’.

“If he’s not available for Tuesday, I’d want him available for Saturday. We’ll know more over the next 24 hours or so.”

Confirmation of Fletcher’s problems is a major blow, with the striker set to be sidelined for up to four months with a serious hamstring issue.

“I’m gutted,” said Warnock. “Ashley’s going to be out for three or four months. I’d be very surprised if he’s here much before the window closes in January.”

With that in mind, Boro could really have done with adding to their attacking resources ahead of Friday’s deadline, but a series of approaches came to nothing, with a proposed season-long loan deal for Everton’s Yannick Bolasie collapsing in the final hour of the window.

Bolasie looked set to join Boro when a deal was close to being agreed on Friday afternoon, but problems emerged in the final hour of the window and while the Middlesbrough hierarchy did their best to resolve them, it proved impossible to complete the loan in time for Bolasie to be registered as a Middlesbrough player.

“I’m disappointed that we didn’t get him, but that’s life,” said Warnock. “There were numerous things that happened in the afternoon, and it just wasn’t meant to be. I’m disappointed, but you have to move on and we’ll see what happens now.

“He was disappointed, but he was partly to blame as well. There were things I should have known before four o’clock yesterday afternoon about his problems at Everton. They were problems that we couldn’t overcome. Well, we tried to, and eventually we did, but it was too late.

“I’ve asked him why I didn’t know about those problems beforehand. He said, ‘Well, I told my agent’, but I said, ‘Well why didn’t the bloody agent tell us that?’ The agent was talking to Neil (Bausor) quite a lot – he should have come up with these problems, not at four o’clock.”

With the window for signing contracted players having closed, Warnock will turn his attention to the free-agent market, although he admits it could prove difficult to identify players capable of significantly improving the current squad.

“I’m not sure what we can do at the minute,” he said. “We’ll look into that. It’s a difficult situation. The players that are available, are they better than what we’ve got?”

Boro’s goalless draw at the weekend highlighted Warnock’s lack of attacking options, although the Middlesbrough manager felt his side had a second-half effort from Jonny Howson wrongly chalked off for offside.

“We thought one goal would do it, and we scored that,” he said. “It disappoints me that a linesman looking right across can’t see that was onside. When (George) Saville plays that ball, there’s a kid in the middle of the goal half a yard inside Jonny.”