Ronald Koeman says he won’t waste energy worrying about Saints’ injury problems ahead of tomorrow’s game at Newcastle, but has slammed the fixture schedule and questioned the need for FA Cup replays.

The Saints boss has guided his team to third place in the Premier League but will be missing key players Toby Alderweireld, Morgan Schneiderlin and Victor Wanyama after the trio picked up injuries over the last week.

Wanyama’s problem was the latest to occur, in the FA Cup third round replay win at Ipswich.

His is particularly frustrating for Koeman, and he has no doubts the rigours of playing so much has contributed.

“In my opinion, it is too many games. Victor Wanyama, for example, played already in the pre-season qualification games for Kenya. It is crazy,” said Koeman.

“Then everybody is starting, needs time, to have five or six weeks preparation to be in a good shape, in a good physical shape. He lost about two or three weeks, with one friendly and two qualification games. It’s stupid, it’s crazy.

“Now, there is the Asian Cup the African Cup [of Nations] please, come on. I don’t understand that but I will not be the first or the last to criticise this.”

Koeman insists he won’t spend too much time worrying about the injuries ahead of the game at St James’ Park, but did join a growing trend of people questioning whether the FA Cup should still have replays for drawn games.

“Yes, okay, but don’t put too much energy in that problem (injuries) because you can’t do anything about that.

“You can always look to what you are doing in the training sessions and how we recover the players, but we haven’t trained in the last few weeks because we played so much.

“It’s a problem with the schedule that the players have during what normally has to be a winter break.

“We have to play. Another replay? Come on, please, play the FA Cup with extra time and penalties. Why a replay? Another game – it’s crazy.”

Koeman is standing by his stance that Saints don’t need to dip into the transfer market at the moment to cover for their injury problems, especially as in the best case scenario he might be up to full strength in just a few weeks, which would mean only having to ride out the league matches against Newcastle and Swansea.

But he believes if things get any worse then it will have to be considered, “I still think we can still handle this up until now, but if we get more problems then of course it will be a problem for us. We know that.”