MORTON boss Dougie Imrie insists it would be unfair to pitch in untried youngsters despite his side's horrendous injury crisis leaving him with a threadbare pool.

A catalogue of Ton stars have been on the treatment table since the campaign began, with more players ruled out this week.

Imrie says the hoodoo is best summed up by the fact that he's lost three players to kneecap injuries in a matter of months.

But he has told the Tele that delving into the club's youth academy to bolster his squad could end up doing more harm than good.

He believes it would be unfair to put some of the youngsters who have penned two year apprenticeships in at the deep end, particularly with the team currently stuck at the foot of the Championship.

He told the Tele: "If you go back as far as January and include Lewis Strapp we've had three boys in the last nine months who've done significant damage to their kneecaps. To me that sums up the injury luck that we're having just now.

"I'd never heard of a player injuring their kneecap like that before and in all that time the training or the programme that we use has never changed. So, it's just a freak of nature to me.

"I'd love to be up there challenging again like last year but we have to work hard and to find a solution until we get everyone back fit.

"We've had a couple of the younger kids in training with the first team at the moment due to the injuries, as every player has missed a period of football somewhere during the season.

"But to bring in more, the gap for those kids between under-18s football and the first team is too big.

"To ask a kid to come out of the eighteens would be too much. The majority of them are first years, so they're sixteen.

"For the majority of them the gap is enormous. For them to come out of that and play in the Championship at that age, they couldn't do it.

"I wouldn't do that to them because you could end up killing them. We need to bleed them into it gradually.

"People always think you need to fill your subs bench, but at the end of the day you can only use five of them.

"I don't get the logic of 'we must fill the bench', because then you've got four bodies who won't get on. Are we just filling the bench to make it look like we've got a squad?

"I feel like that's doing it for the wrong reasons and not for the right ones. It's great to have those options but at the end of the day we can only use five subs."

Imrie takes his depleted squad to Firhill today for a tough test against Partick.

He says it is vital they cut out the mistakes which have cost them dearly in recent weeks.

He continued: "I genuinely don't believe that there's a lot wrong with how we're playing.

"I just firmly believe that we're getting punished for every mistake we make, which is meaning we're a goal or two down before we've blinked.

"Then we seem to get a new lease of life and kick into gear.

"We're just not getting the breaks or scoring the first goal enough. I guarantee if we could, then we'll go on to win more games because the first goal in the Championship is pivotal to that."