Town boss Roy Keane has confirmed that wages will be the big issue when it comes to signing loan striker Daryl Murphy from Sunderland on a permanent basis. The Blues boss is waiting until the end of the season before looking at any potential deal for the Irish international.
Murphy would like to stay at Portman Road beyond the end of his loan but Keane says discussions regarding a longer term deal will wait until the summer: "We’ll have to see. Let’s look at it at the end of the season. We’ve got a lot of strikers, Jon Stead, Tamás Priskin, Kevin Lisbie, a lot of players to come back to the football club.
"We have to see what Sunderland say, we have to be respectful of that, and a lot of the issues won’t be whether we can agree a fee or if the player wants to come, they’ll be wages.”
Keane says he is fully aware of the terms of Murphy’s deal at the Stadium of Light, which isn’t up until June 2012, and jokes that he now regrets having offered it to him back in his days as Black Cats manager: "I gave him that contract when I was at Sunderland. I shouldn’t have given him so much!”
The Blues boss says it’s always hard for Championship clubs to sign Premier League players: "When you’re buying players from the Premiership they’re at a level which that’s hard to compete with.
"Other clubs have been able to do it, but at this moment we won’t be able to. But, of course, you’ll always hope that you can push the boat out for a striker.
"But let’s cross that bridge at the end of the season. I think it’s dangerous to be talking about players who aren’t our players.
"There’s a lot of work to be done in terms of building the football club because four of our players are loan players.”
Keane has been very pleased with how Murphy has performed since he joined the club at the end of January: "We’re delighted with Murph and David Healy will certainly score goals between now and the end of the season when he gets his opportunity. We have to pick him for the right games.
"Murph and Pablo did OK on Saturday. Murph’s got six goals, he’s our leading goalscorer. He’s been here 11 games, so that tells you where our problems have been all season — we’ve not scored enough goals.
"We tried to get Murph last summer and we didn’t get him, but there’s no point talking about ifs and ands.”
The Town manager was also impressed with Pablo Couñago’s performance against Barnsley: "Pablo, like the other players at the club, has his strengths and weaknesses and we have to try and get the balance right with who plays with Pablo when he plays.
"We said to a lot of our players to chase these lost causes and a lost cause led us to win the game. He did well and was unlucky not to score, but Murphy, as you’d expect, was in the right place.”
However, Keane feels that the Spaniard, who has scored only twice this season, is one of a number of Town frontmen who should be hitting the net more often: "What we hope for from a lot of our strikers, not just Pablo but David Healy, Connor, Murph, Steady when he was here, Priskin, is some more goals. As much as we can praise their workrate, ultimately they’ll be judged on goals.”
The Town boss says Couñago’s season has been hampered by his summer groin injury: "If you look at pre-season Pablo missed the first seven weeks after getting injured after 10 minutes of the first morning, which was a disappointment.
"But he’s bounced back and is back in the fold. Like I keep saying, players will always get a chance, just like Garvs got a chance when people were writing him off. The players who are here will always have a chance of playing for me.”