2D melee Combat with SphereCastAll Problem

Hey so

im using a spherecastall to detect hits when my 2d enemy ai attacks the player

im setting the direction for the ray to cast then im Invoking the sphere cast after 1 second. the sphere casting is casted in that direction . then if it gets a hit it apply damage to the hit (that's basically how my script works)

now the problem im having is that if my ai is to close to the player when it casts the sphere cast and the sphere radius is more that 0.1 it doesn't detect the hit of the player because its is created around the player and his collider is inside it(this is why my ai doesnt hit the player). is there any way i can fix this. OR is there a better system i could use i had a couple of ideas

1: attach a spherecollider(trigger) to a gameobject and enable it when the attack animation is playing and then i could animate the collider to match swing patterns of the different types of enemy's.

2: the other idea was to make some sort of field and see if the player is within the area/field and then apply damage to them

Thanks for Reading ~Scott