Ahead of their FA Cup quarterfinal against Coventry, O'Neil said: He's incredibly hard working and honest, unbelievably so. Sometimes we have to stop him for the good of himself. He works so hard and there's always extras available with the coaching staff, and senior players are good at picking their moments where they need a bit more and where they need to rest. Nathan's always there, in the gym on his days off, always doing extras on the grass, so we're trying to help him with his understanding.
When he hurt his hip, he set himself back shortly after from coming back too quickly and doing too much. I've been there and done that you feel like you need more to be better and sometimes it isn't that. We're trying to help him with that. The way he's come back from his injury has meant we've had to bide our time with him a little bit, he hasn't played a lot of football, I think his last significant amount of minutes were back in October, so it took us a while to get to a point where we felt he could last a decent amount of a Premier League game.
He started to tire towards the end of the last one, of course, so let's see if it's best to use him from the start or from the bench. I haven't named the team yet, so the lads don't know the starting 11. Let's see how everyone is in the morning. I loved what I saw from him last week, which was giving everything until he literally had nothing left and he couldn't move his legs, and we had to take him off. I love that about him, that he's unbelievably willing to do whatever it takes."