STEVE WATSON has revealed the personal frustrations of sitting out two self-isolation periods inside a month.

York City players and staff first went into two-week isolation after confirming a positive Covid-19 test on October 22.

The Minstermen played at Southport on November 10 before forcibly retreating into isolation for another two weeks immediately afterwards.

In game terms, this has resulted in City falling six games behind schedule, with a further fixture postponed because of positive cases at Chester ahead of the meeting at Bootham Crescent.

Off the field, meanwhile, a largely healthy first-team squad, Watson reports, have been inactive for almost a month in total.

However, the boss was also keen to balance City's woes with the wider populace.

“I’m an active person and I hate being cooped up,” Watson said.

“But I’m not a player - these lads are fully fit, very healthy and, apart from two lads, none have had symptoms.

“To have 20-odd fully-fit footballers not able to leave the house for a month has been tough.

“Things are not like lockdown the first time when we didn’t know when the end was coming. We’ve always had a date we’d be back in training.

“We’ve done everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and everything we could before Southport, but if you’ve got 20 players in the changing room on top of each other, I don’t know what we can do about that.

“But I’m always reluctant to talk about how tough things are and how hard we have had it because I want to put things in perspective with the rest of the world and country.

“A lot of people have had things a lot harder than we have.”

Following Saturday’s Leamington defeat, York return to action at Blyth Spartans tomorrow (7.45pm).