BOSS James Stokoe is planning as if Magpies’ game with Yate this afternoon will definitely go ahead – despite recent history and forecasts saying otherwise.

Since moving in to their new home of New Cuthbury, the Magpies have struggled with poor drainage on their pitch, leading to several postponements and an abandoned game.

With the ground only 16 months old, the club are embroiled in a back and forth with the pitch providers, who claim that the Magpies have not taken the proper measures to maintain the pitch, even though for most of its existence no football has been played on it.

Wimborne's festive fixture with Salisbury on December 27 was postponed due to the weather

Whilst it may seem futile preparing for a game when it appears likely it will be rained off, Stokoe stated that all his charges could do was focus on the match, rather than worry about what-ifs.

Stokoe told the Daily Echo: “First and foremost, we plan that we’re gonna have a game. We train on a Thursday in preparation for the Saturday's game, what we need to do for ourselves and, to cause the opposition problems.

“Then we just plough ahead until we know otherwise, until the pitch has let us down.

“It’s not an ideal situation to be going into sort of every week in the coming months with the weather. It’s something we've got to deal with this season.

“And obviously on the flip side, we're lucky to have the 3G here, which we can get booked out just in case so we can get an extra training session in.”

One Magpie who will definitely not have a game this weekend is Bouwe Bosma, with his suspension kicking in after his red-card at Poole last weekend.

Stokoe admitted that the absence of Bosma in Wimborne’s midfield would be a big miss, stating: “Yeah, he's gonna be (a) massive (miss for us.). Bos has come in for us, he was excellent in the Gosport game.

“I just feel when I was looking around the changing rooms when the referee said we were restarting at Poole, he was one of probably four, maybe five players that mentally didn't look right.

“I think we were all critical of the decision he made to go lunging in for that tackle.

“But yeah, (against Truro) again, excellent. He’s a big strong lad.

“He gets through, gets through the work rate. And he's a leader, which we needed.

“It's gonna be a loss on Saturday that he's not with us but you know, unfortunately we got to deal with that as a situation he's put himself in.

“He's held his hands up, he's let himself and his teammates down.”

New signing Gerard Benfield is available, whilst Scott Arnold and Billy Maybury should also be available after suffering from COVID.