Town manager Paul Jewell says target Jason Pearce’s weekend comments regarding his proposed move from Portsmouth illustrate the Pompey central defender’s character. The Blues boss is hoping to sign Pearce and team-mates Joel Ward and Stephen Henderson before today’s 11pm deadline.
Jewell said: "That shows the way he is committed to the club that pays his wages at the moment. I think what he’s saying is that it’s out of his hands, that he hasn’t asked for a move.
"He’s playing for Portsmouth and he’s a Portsmouth player, so he’s entitled to say that. That doesn’t mean to say that he wouldn’t be interested in going to Real Madrid or whoever it might be.
"I think that shows the lad has decent character. I think it would be disrespectful for him to talk about leaving a football club while he was playing in that team. I wouldn’t read too much into that, one way or the other.”
While the Town boss remains hopeful of making signings before the window closes this evening, he doesn’t expect to get all his trio of Pompey targets: "It’s not dead but, by the sounds of it, it will be difficult to get all three.”
If he doesn’t get his first choices, he says he’s not going to sign just anyone instead: "I think it’s important to target the players you want and not to get players in because we’re in the situation we’re in, looking down the barrel.
"It’s critical to get the right ones. It’s easy to bring in players. I could buy players today that wouldn’t improve us.
"But it’s important to try and hold your nerve,” he continued. "I know everyone wants us to improve, no one more than me, but I still think you’ve got to try and have more of a long-term vision if you can and think that if we can’t get the players in in this window, can we get through to the summer and get them then?
"The most important thing is winning matches and it’s not as if we’ve got a team full of mugs. We’ve got a team which hasn’t over the season produced its best over enough games, but it’s a team which can be full of good players.”
Jewell is no fan of the transfer window, or the fact that there are fixtures on its final day: "It’s ridiculous that there are games on Tuesday and Wednesday — and the Premier League is the same — when the deadline is Tuesday at 11pm.”
He says the window is making doing business more difficult: "I think it’s getting harder and harder because the transfer window forces everything into a bottleneck.
"In the old days I think it was the last Thursday in March you couldn’t sign players after, which I think was better because you could buy and sell players right throughout the season when you needed them. Now you’re thinking you need someone just in case.
"Having said that, in the Football League, the loan market is open to us. So, when the window closes on Tuesday at 11pm, it opens for loans next week, so it’s not as final as in the Premier League.”
The Liverpudlian admits it’s easier to sell a player a club which is higher in the league but feels Town are still a draw despite their current lowly position: "It’s always easier selling your club if you’re top of the league rather than you are if you’re at the bottom, but I still think Ipswich is a club that people regard as a big club.
"OK, it’s going through a tough time at the moment but hopefully we can sell them the vision that we have that we want to be in the Premier League. The club’s been there before, it’s got great facilities, great support.
"There are a lot of boxes it ticks at the moment, but the one that isn’t ticked is the league position, but hopefully people can see beyond that and see that Ipswich is still an attractive proposition.
"I want people to come here for the right reasons, not just because it’s a nice club and it’s a nice area. We want people to come here hungry and ambitious to take the club forward.”
Jewell says the final day of the transfer window can see deals come about very quickly: "It’s amazing how things happen. We might get a couple of phone calls out of the blue about a couple of our players and things fall into place. You just don’t know.
"That’s the nonsense of it, everyone’s working against the deadline and everything seems to be crammed into the last 48 hours. I would say, don’t be surprised if there are surprises.”