Town boss Roy Keane says the Blues are considering a loan offer for one of their senior players. The club are weighing up whether to allow the unnamed player to leave with Keane admitting that members of his squad could be sacrificed in order to make new additions during January.
The Blues manager says offers have been received and that it’s a potential short-term switch which is receiving most attention: "More the loan offer we have at the moment for one of our senior players.
"We might have to do that, it depends. If I’m after a certain signing where the player we’re after is only a loan deal, we have to balance the books with the wages. I think I said that last summer as well, which is why we missed out on one or two senior players.”
The Blues boss has outlined his targets and says he has two or three specific names he wants to join the club, ideally on a permanent basis: "We certainly need another striker into the club, Connor Wickham’s had a lot of injuries and another of our strikers, Rory Fallon, is only on loan and that expires in a few weeks.
"With Gianni getting called back, we’ve had players doing a job for us at right-back, whether it was Troy Brown or Jaime Peters, but these boys aren’t right-backs.
"We probably need someone in the middle of the park, if Jake Livermore is called back by Tottenham. Shane O’Connor now is ruled out for definitely six, maybe seven weeks. We’ll lose Jack in the middle of the park because he’ll have to do a job for us on the left, or perhaps Carlos can come across from the right.”
Keane says he has handed his wish-list to owner Marcus Evans and chief executive Simon Clegg: "You can’t do too much officially until January. You can make the odd phone call.
"I’m the manager of the football club and I’ll give the targets to the chief executive and the owner, and I have to focus on trying to win football matches, which I’ve probably not done well enough.”
The Blues boss says he will learn what funds he has to spend in order to augment his depleted squad in the days and weeks to come, but accepts that Marcus Evans has provided both himself and Jim Magilton with significant cash: "To be fair to the owner he’ll probably say he’s backed all the managers here, he keeps the club going. Don’t think for one minute it’s not costing the owner money.
"I appreciate it’s easy to spend other people’s money, but we also have assets — do we have to sell one or two of our players? I don’t know. Watch this space.”
One player who Keane doesn’t expect to be on his way, despite all the reports to the contrary, is Connor Wickham, although he admits that nothing is ever certain in football: "Not in January I wouldn’t have thought.”
Keane - whose terms with Town are up in June - also concedes that his contract position could be a factor when it comes to Evans and Clegg allocating him funds: "Why buy a player and commit to a half a million or a million pound deal and give a player a two or three-year contract when [the manager only has four months on his contract]? But that’s the industry we’re in, I think that goes on at every club.”
The Town boss has reiterated that he wants deals done as soon as possible, feeling that the club has been tardy on this front before, with the need for new players more urgent after the training ground injuries to Brian Murphy (ankle, three months) and Shane O’Connor (shoulder, six weeks).
Keane says that he and his staff will look at their work on the training ground to see whether there that may have contributed to the injury problems, but thinks that believes that more than anything the club has been unfortunate: "We’re certainly short of numbers. I’ve never known anything like it with the injuries. We’ll have to look at the training we’re doing, the intensity, but I think sometimes you can be unlucky.
"Murph just went over on his ankle, although Shane got nailed by one of the goalkeepers, which I certainly wasn’t too pleased about. I think that could have been avoided because Shane was doing really well for us. He’s popular amongst the group. If I was him I wouldn’t have been happy with the tackle.”