Birmingham City boss Alex McLeish has confirmed that Town made an enquiry regarding midfielder Lee Carsley earlier in the season. The former Ireland international is out of favour at St Andrew’s and is thought likely to want to leave in January.
McLeish, however, says he wants to keep both Carsley and fellow veteran Kevin Phillips, but concedes that he would allow them to leave to allow them to play games elsewhere: "Roy Keane, at Ipswich, did express an interest earlier in the season and it wasn’t right for me to let Cars go, even if I wanted to.
"If the players were to say to me ‘look I’ve got a really good opportunity here, what do you think?’, and because they are not getting regular football here, I would have to consider that.
"But I would still like to have two very influential characters hanging around. They’re good players, they’re around the squad just now.”
Town were initially linked with Carsley in August and then again earlier this week.