Newcastle United head coach Matthias Jaissle insists it still feels like pre-season on the training ground when it comes to reintegrating players who have missed periods of the campaign through injury.
The Magpies' lengthy treatment list caused issues last month when nine first team players were ruled out of their 2-1 win over Hull City at St James' Park, with five of the under-21s squad called up to the matchday squad.
Injured players returning
Those players are slowly starting to get back to fitness, though, with Dan Burn starting his first match of the season in Sunday's 2-0 win over Crystal Palace, with Joelinton, Amar Dedic and Will Osula also making their return to the starting XI.
Anthony Elanga and Jacob Ramsey were also back on the bench at Selhurst Park, too, and while things are looking more stable, the former Al-Ahli and RB Salzburg boss feels he needs more time to implement his ideas because of the disruption of those injuries.
Everton double-header
This week will see Jaissle's side take on Everton twice - first in the Carabao Cup on Thursday in Merseyside before taking them on in the Premier League at St James' Park - two-and-a-half months after he first faced the Toffees in a pre-season friendly in Edinburgh in just his second game in charge.
Newcastle were beaten 3-1 at Murrayfield that night with Jaissle just a week into the job and there were fears, 10 days out from their opening game of the campaign, because of how disjointed the performance was that night.
Progress measured
With that in mind, Jaissle was asked if this week's matches against David Moyes' side are a useful yardstick to measure their progress under him so far.
"It will still take time," Jaissle told Chronicle Live. "I mentioned it last week here that sometimes we feel that it's still summer or pre-season when it comes to the training sessions to bring basics into the team.
"We had so many injuries at the peak, eight or nine. Then the weeks with the national teams, where you cannot really work in detail with the whole team. So all these aspects lead to the fact that we're still in the process.
"They are getting now more stable but we still have time to improve needed. As I mentioned, you cannot just think the injured players are back. Eight or nine of them or now seven of them are back but they were out for a long, long time.
"They couldn't train with us, they couldn't implement our ideas so we need to be patient with them. There was progress to see now, as your colleague said rightly and fairly enough against Crystal Palace and from there we want to build on that."
