Manager Roy Keane has admitted that Town have failed to land his two of his main summer targets, despite the players being keen to join the club. The Blues boss says that he may have to rely on last year’s squad, which finished 15th in the Championship, to make a promotion challenge during 2010/11.
One of the players involved is almost certainly former Crystal Palace skipper Shaun Derry, who instead opted to join QPR, where bigger wages were probably on offer, while Cardiff striker Michael Chopra has also been amongst the players interesting the Blues.
Keane, who started pre-season training with his squad this morning, admits he is frustrated at so far having been unable to make signings: "I've spoken to two players that were keen to come here, but we couldn’t do the deals. My job is to identify the players and speak to them, which I have done, but we never managed to get the deals done.
"So, we’re disappointed, but I’m looking forward to working with the players we had last year and we just get on with it.
"All I can do is identify players I think will improve [the squad] and it’s up to the club to try and do the deals and we’ve not managed to do that. It’s frustrating and disappointing, but that’s the way it is.”
Keane says he feels no anger about the moves falling through being well aware of all the potential difficulties when signing players: "When any deal you’re involved in doesn’t work out, you’re going to be frustrated. Not angry, because you can never relax when you’re trying to negotiate with players or agents or clubs. You know that there are going to be pitfalls on the way.
"As I said, we were hopeful on one or two players who would have been very good for us. That they wanted to come to the club was a big plus for me, but the fact that these deals didn’t get done would lead to frustration, but certainly not anger because I’ve been in football long enough and know it takes a lot for these deals to get done.”
The former Ireland skipper says there may be a chance of reviving certain deals: "We hope so, but I have to look at my role in it, which is to identify the players, speak to them to try and persuade them to come to the club. I then step back and the club do the deals and we’ve not managed to do that.
"People will look at me when we don’t get results, and with the people I work with we’ve got to try and get these players in, but we have decent numbers in terms of the squad we have and we just get on with it.
"I think every manager when he comes back pre-season would like one or two new faces, but it’s not happened and, having said that, the players we brought in last year we hope will have a better start to the season than they did last year. We’ll have more of a settled squad now, so in a strange way it might help us a little bit.”