Eddie Howe now says he has no idea when ‘perfect’ player will return to action

Newcastle United's injury list is showing no signs of improvement but one star is causing fans a lot of concern.

Eddie Howe has had to make do without £35million Rolls Royce defender Sven Botman since the end of September after the Dutch international picked up a knee injury.

There have been many false dawns since then when it looked like Botman would be coming back, but after another setback, Eddie Howe seems to have given up trying to reassure fans that his return is near.

Howe says he has pretty much the same players to pick from as he did for Wolves

Speaking to the media this morning, Eddie Howe was of course asked about injury updates and he confirmed that there would be no players returning from injury this weekend and the squad is pretty much the same as it was for the Wolves game minus Matt Targett.

Much like the Newcastle fans, the media wanted to know of any updates on Sven Botman as the player described by Ben Foster as 'literally perfect' (video below) is a huge miss for Newcastle, even though Jamaal Lascelles has stepped up brilliantly to plug the gap.

Howe was reluctant to give any sense of hope, however, and admitted he doesn't know what's happening (via The Chronicle).

Eddie Howe says we will have to wait weeks for an update on Botman

"Unfortunately not [an update] with Sven. We’ll have to wait and see over the next few weeks and then hopefully we’ll get some more news but at the moment we’re still waiting to find out."

So it looks like we're best off not expecting to see Botman again before Christmas as it'll take him a while to get back to full fitness you'd imagine.

With the January transfer window still a long way off we just hope that the worst of our injury concerns are behind us now.