Boss Roy Keane says he is yet to work out his pre-season plans for 2010/11 or talk to chief executive Simon Clegg regarding his budget for the season ahead. Keane says he has spent the last few weeks concentrating on securing the club’s Championship status.
Keane says he’ll start to work on setting out the pre-season programme in the next few days: "We’ll probably look at it next week. There are plenty of offers there for games.
"We had an excellent training camp in Portugal last year, we’ll probably look at that again, so hopefully there’s good options for us out there. We have had different priorities over the last few weeks — getting victories.
The Blues boss will consider whether to make changes to last season’s preparations with the Blues failing to win any of their first 14 matches: "That’s something we’ll have to consider without a shadow of a doubt.
"Pre-season’s all about getting fit for the start of the season but, going back to the first few games, the Coventry match, for example, the chances we had in that game and the goals we gave away, there was no question about our fitness levels.
"I think we are the fittest team in the league and that’s a plus. You may say that that doesn’t win football matches, I know it doesn’t, but it gives you a chance.
"Pre-season last year you have to remember [fitness coach] Antonio Gomez had only just come to the club, as had myself and Tony Loughlan. It was our first pre-season and we’ve learnt a lot more about the group. There will be changes to pre-season, of course.”
Keane also says he will soon be discussing his summer transfer budget with Simon Clegg: "Again there was no point in talking about that until we had more wins under our belt.
"Two weeks ago I wasn’t going to be sitting down talking about budgets when everyone else was saying I was leaving, so I thought I’d wait until we’d won one or two! That will take care of itself over the weeks and months ahead.
"Identifying players and budgets is the easy part, it’s going and getting the players, attracting them and giving them the right deals that’s the hard part.
"I know there are clubs out there in the Championship who give particularly big, big wages and we won’t be prepared to do that, so like everybody else we’ll have to wheel and deal.”