NIALL Canavan has been helping City’s injured duo Lee Angol and Abo Eisa laugh their way back to fitness.

The hamstring victims are still being nursed back having been sidelined since the opening weeks of the season.

Angol is on course to resume training by the end of the month but there is no timescale with Eisa after the winger suffered a recent setback following his brief return to the squad.

The duo’s absence has been a cause of frustration amid City’s indifferent results.

But captain Canavan, who is just back from his own injury, has been trying to keep their spirits up while he was out the team as well.

He said: “It was hard, they’d been out for a couple of weeks before.

“You can tell when people have hit a bit of a lull where they are bored of the monotonous side of doing your rehab.

“You just try and have a bit of a laugh. We come up with different things to do and put some games in there to make it more fun.

“You do whatever you can that changes the flow of what the days have been.

“You’re basically winding each other up. But that’s how you get through it – you take the mickey and try to build little bonds with people.

“You’ll have to ask them if they appreciated it! There were probably times when they just want you to shut up and go away.

“But hopefully that happy atmosphere translates through the building and keeps people’s minds on the bigger picture.”

Eisa has not kicked a ball since the Carabao Cup first-round tie against Nottingham Forest.

He was named on the bench in City’s last away game at Newport a fortnight ago but then felt a twinge during a training warm-up a few days later.

Angol’s impressive start with the club was brought to a sudden halt four games in with a similar problem to the one that forced him to miss most of the second half of last season with Leyton Orient.

Canavan added: “Lee and Eis are both away from home but they live near each other so it’s probably been a bit of a comfort for the two of them going through a similar process.

“Hopefully there’s light at the end of the tunnel. They’ve always been upbeat from when I was in there.

“If you’d asked them to train, they would have done so even though they weren’t ready.

“The pair of them are both eager to get back involved.

“Sometimes that can be as much of a hindrance because you push things a little bit more than you should at times. But you certainly wouldn’t want to take that out of either of them.

“They seem in good spirits. Eis maybe feels he’s gone back a few steps from being in and then dropping out, but hopefully that’s saved us from anything that was potentially going to be worse.”