Steve Evans will be forced to make changes for Tuesday night’s visit of Cardiff City, but the United head coach insists he would have altered his side regardless of absences to Sol Bamba and Tom Adeyemi.

Bamba will serve a one-match ban after picking up his fifth yellow card of the season in last Thursday’s defeat to Blackburn Rovers, while on-loan midfielder Tom Adeyemi is ineligible to face his parent club.

That could mean an opportunity at the heart of defence for either Giuseppe Bellusci or Scott Wootton, while the likes of Jordan Botaka, Will Buckley and Alex Mowatt are among those pushing for a place across the midfield.

But, enforced or not, Evans says he planned to make changes based on Thursday night’s disappointing showing against Blackburn.

“We’ve got to freshen it up, but forgetting Sol and forgetting Tom, our performance on Thursday would have dictated that anyway,” he said.

“The performance said we would make changes.

“We were all surprised and flabbergasted – put it however you want – to be two-down in six minutes.

“That’s hard for any team in world football (to come back from), nevermind a team with the home record that we have.

“I thought we showed some real character in the second half and statistics are a wonderful thing because if you look at them in isolation, we were better than at Fulham.

“That’s horrific to show how stats can be misleading because we weren’t very good.”

On the preparation for Tuesday’s game, Evans added: “We’ve got them in and we’ve kept them nice and fresh because we were aware that some of them have played quite a bit of football.

“Hopefully we we’re ready to go against a very good Cardiff City team.”