EXETER City have bolstered their attacking ranks ahead of Saturday's League One clash with Blackpool by signing winger Tony Yogane from Premier League side Brentford.

The 19-year-old wings in for the remainder of the season and takes the Grecians back up to five loanees now with goalkeeper Joe Whitworth, defender Johnly Yfeko and midfielders Kamari Doyle and Joel Colwill.

Yogane is a product of the Sheffield Wednesday Academy, despite being born in Croydon, but turned down a scholarship with the Owls join preference of joining the Bees’ B team, where he played with other former City loanees Ryan Trevitt and Tristan Crama.

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This season, Yogane has already had a taste of first-team life at Brentford when he came on as a substitute in their Carabao Cup win against Leyton Orient at the Gtech Community Stadium. He has also been featuring heavily for the B-team.

City assistant manager Kevin Nicholson says the Grecians are ‘getting close’ to further new players to help bolster their stretched squad.

With Crama’s return to Brentford followed by a potentially season-ending injury to Yfeko – and with captain Pierce Sweeney already on the sidelines – City’s options have been severely dented, hence the recall of Academy graduates Cheick Diabate and Ed James from loan spells at Bradford City and Yeovil Town respectively.

Diabate came on as a substitute in the closing stages of the midweek draw at Peterborough United, but that is his only action since returning to Valley Parade with City boss Gary Caldwell using other players out of position in the centre back roles instead. It is one area of the team that does need strengthening and Nicholson is hoping that will be soon, although did not elaborate on when that could be.

“Hopefully,” Nicholson said when asked of any developments on the transfer front. “I’ll leave that one to Gary to go through.

“We’re doing a lot of work, all of us, from Marcus (Flitcroft) through the recruitment into Gary, myself, Perks (David Perkins), Greener (Dan Green) and Lauren (Jones).

“There’s a lot of work going on in identifying what we might be able to get, what they’re going to bring to the team, how that might change how we go about things, but we’re getting there, we’re close.”

To be fair, those that have stepped into the side have stepped up to the plate in the wake of City’s defensive issues, it is at the other end of the pitch where things are not clicking.

That has certainly been the case in the last two games, with City failing to get into the penalty box, let alone have a shot in a 1-0 loss at Birmingham City last week, while they rescued a point at Peterborough thanks to a stoppage time penalty that was missed by Millenic Alli, who then converted the rebound.

Caldwell has often said this season that Exeter need to be better in the final third, but that is not something Nicholson necessarily agrees with.

“The last two games, yeah, like with Peterborough, we probably could and should have done more,” he said. “Birmingham, we’re disappointed that we didn’t show a little bit more personality when the opportunity came, but if you go back before that, I think we’d average two goals a game for the last five or six.

“It’s the hardest thing to do in football, which is why those guys at the top get paid so much money to do it. We’re working really hard on that but our goal return up until these last two games has been really quite good over that period of time through Christmas and up to now, so it’s not something that we’re concerned with.

“It’s something that we work on all the time. We’ve got talented, attacking players but it’s not just about them. We attack as a team and we defend as a team so if we get a clean sheet it’s not just because of Joe Whitworth and it’s not just because of the back four, it’s because the first defenders, the nines have put pressure on and made it difficult for the opposition.

“If we don’t score goals it’s not just because the strikers aren’t scoring, it’s because we’re not building properly to get into good areas to cross the ball to give them the opportunities, so we will live and die as a team and that goes for us as coaches and managers as well. But yeah, the last two games, I get what you’re saying, but five or six games before that, you’d have argued it the other way, I think.”