Town boss Paul Jewell says he was eyeing a couple of potential targets when he watched Huddersfield beat Sheffield United 3-0 at Bramall Lane on Tuesday. But the Blues manager played down tabloid links with Manchester City’s Israeli winger Gai Assulin.
Jewell confirmed that as reported by TWTD on Wednesday, he was in South Yorkshire to take in the game, joking that his target was a former Blues player: "I was there the other night. I was watching the young lad up front — Alan Lee! I was on my way to Manchester [for the Aaron Cresswell tribunal] and I stopped at Sheffield.”
While the Town boss has previously said that not all his scouting trips are related to specific targets, he confirmed that a number of players were in his sights on Tuesday with the Blues previously having been linked with Blades Matt Lowton, Stephen Quinn and Ched Evans: "I was looking at specific targets at that one. I went to have a look at a couple of players, maybe not just for this season but maybe looking for the future.
"In this job normally you don’t get time, but the way I want to do it is plan for the long-term and do things as correctly as possible because I believe if you can plan long-term you can make better objective decisions rather than thinking from week to week.”
The Blues boss confirmed that he has talked to Assulin’s club Manchester City about possible loans but isn’t looking to make a signing at the current time: "We’ve asked about a lot of players and I’ve spoken to David Platt on a few occasions about players at Manchester City that might be available for loan, but we won’t be pursuing that at the moment.
"I look around and I think for the future we want young, vibrant, hungry players to be in this team for next year.
"At the moment our team is very experienced but for the future we’ve got to bring in some young legs and some energy, some vibrancy which will help us to get the right mix.
"At the minute we probably haven’t got the right mix, we’ve just got a lot of experienced players, who are good players, but we need that vibrancy, youth and desire.”