West Brom's Matt Phillips set to miss rest of season after quad surgery

The winger sustained the setback as a late substitute in the 4-0 FA Cup third round replay victory against National League Chesterfield two Tuesdays ago.

Phillips initially met with a consultant before it was this week confirmed that an operation would be required on the injured muscle and a period of 12 to 16 weeks would be the recovery time.

That timescale means 31-year-old Phillips, who is contracted until the end of next season, may have turned out for Albion for the final time this season.

Carlos Corberan, who takes his side to Bristol City for an FA Cup fourth round tie tomorrow, also offered updates on Kyle Bartley – whose comeback from a lengthy thigh injury was delayed by a further setback – and a fresh blow to midfielder John Swift, who is out of tomorrow's tie.

"He's going to need surgery," Corberan said of Phillips. "He will have it Saturday. The recovery time is around 12-16 weeks after surgery. Probably it will be difficult for him to come back this season.

"Bartley is going to play in the B team (under-21s against Villa at The Hawthorns on Friday night), after a long time without any football we understand he is going to need game time with the B team first. That's a positive.

"We don't know (for Coventry), hopefully today he'll play 60 minutes and let's see how he progresses through 60 minutes.

"After that let's see how he keeps training. I don't know.

"(Kenneth) Zohore has been training yesterday with the staff, but he has been training separately. He's another player who is progressing.

"We are for the next game going to miss Swift, because two days ago he turned his ankle and unfortunately it's not possible for him to be involved for this game. Hopefully he is ready to train with the group for next week."

Corberan dismissed the feeling of regret when asked about introducing Phillips as a late sub while 3-0 up in the replay.

The head coach said: "If I need to evaluate my decision dependent on the results I would be crazy about this.

"Because, of course now if you tell me Matty Phillips is going to be injured in this game of course he wouldn't play.

"But nobody in life can know this. Now you could be thinking if he doesn't play that game maybe he could play the next and hurt his knee, or have an accident with his car, or something different.

"That's the thing in life, you never know, of course when you make some decisions and the impact is negative, you can be thinking with yourself 'OK I should try to avoid', we made a decision for him not to start and play 30 minutes because we understand from the medical perspective there wasn't any type of risk.

"With (Daryl) Dike it was a risk and that's why we didn't involve him. Every time one player is in the football pitch or training pitch there is a risk, always.

"Every time you take your car to move to one place, there is always a risk. The risk is part of life. To avoid risk we have our knowledge, intelligence, skills to analyse the circumstances and make the right decisions.

"This is what I tried to do, talking with my medical staff, always before games to see any type of risk that allows me to make decisions. In this case it didn't appear.

"Maybe it would've happened the next day in training, because the players that didn't play had a demanding training."