Ethan Wheatley's situation 'not ideal' for Cobblers, admits Nolan

Wheatley received his second call-up of the season and again came on as a second half substitute when England Under-20s were beaten 1-0 by Switzerland at St George’s Park last Friday evening.

The 19-year-old Manchester United loanee then headed straight back down the M1 to sit on the bench for Northampton, and his services were required just 21 minutes into their League One fixture with Rotherham due to an early injury to Jack Vale.

Wheatley worked hard but endured a frustrating 70 plus minutes on the pitch as Cobblers were beaten 2-1, and Nolan, who spent a period as England Under-20s interim head coach last year, admitted it was far from a perfect situation.

"It’s not 100 per cent ideal for us,” he said. “But we understand and we don't want to take that opportunity away from him. We have a really good relationship with the FA and with Ben Futcher (England Under-20s head coach). We have conversations with them in terms of managing his minutes because he’s playing a lot of game-time with us and they are doing that.

"He probably played a bit longer than I expected him to with England on Friday but I don’t want to take that opportunity away from the lad because he’s proud to be English and he wants to represent his country and he wants to go the top and hopefully we can help him with his development.

"It’s a good opportunity when you’re at St George’s Park and I’ve seen it before when I had the privilege to work with the England youth teams and you see players getting bumped up and Ethan had a lovely opportunity to go and train with the first-team last week.

"It’s a great opportunity for all the young lads and you don’t want to take that away from them but it’s not ideal because he’s not able to prepare with us and the preparation wasn’t what we would have liked for a Saturday game.

"But I thought he came on did well. He worked hard and now we need to look after him because he had to play a lot longer than what we had planned.”