Dylan Mackenzie hopes to banish four months of injury frustration to make his Nairn County return.
A knee injury suffered against Wick Academy in October, coupled with an aborted comeback against Lossiemouth a month later, has seen the young striker sit out a significant part of the campaign.
To increase his annoyance, Nairn’s last four games have been postponed, with Mackenzie primed to make his comeback earlier than this weekend’s trip to Turriff United.
“I feel like I’ve been training for ages but we’ve not had a game,” said Mackenzie.
“I damaged the meniscus in my knee against Wick – it happened in the last 20 seconds of the game. My leg was planted and my momentum just pushed my knee.
“I tried to play against Lossie in November. I’d trained during the week without any real pain. I came on for the last 10 minutes and the moment I tried to turn on the ball, I felt it again.
“I’ve been back and forth to the physio getting treatment and the doctors have given me exercises to do. I’ve been coming into training and running; because we’ve had quite a lot of free weeks, I’ve been training three times a week without a game.
“It’s been so frustrating. I’m not very good at going to watch games that I should be playing in.”
The 21-year-old started the season well, finding the net seven times in 13 games.
In his absence, the Wee County have added Scott Davidson from Brora Rangers, who has also found the net regularly for Fort William and Rothes.
Nairn’s last game was the 6-0 defeat at home to Formartine on February 8, with the lack of games seeing them drop away from the top six.
Mackenzie added: “Everyone was pretty eager to get another game after that and it’s not really happened yet.
“The Clach game we were never really sure about because of their ground situation but the game we had after that was Formartine again, where we were looking to put things right but never had a chance. You don’t think about it a lot but you do remember it.”
Mackenzie is understandably keen to make his mark in the last month or so of the season and jokingly sees himself as one of the older heads in Nairn’s youthful squad.
He said: “I remember when I started, we’d have the old boys against the young boys in training.
“Now pretty much everyone would be in the young category, so I’m not sure how that would go.
“You’d have games where it would be youngsters in the middle a lot of the time (trying to get the ball back). Before, that was me and now I don’t think I’ve been in once.”
