Boss Paul Jewell has confirmed that Town were eyeing Peterborough striker Tyrone Barnett prior to his £1 million-plus move from Crawley to London Road last month. The Blues were understood to be close to making an offer for the 26-year-old during the January transfer window.
Jewell says 6ft 3in tall Barnett was someone Town were monitoring: "He’s a good player. We watched him and looked at him.
"They’ve also got the lad Paul Taylor up front, who’s a good player, Lee Tomlin, George Boyd, Grant McCann, they're all good players. But we’ve got some good players as well and I’m sure it’ll be an entertaining game.”
Like Town midfielder Andy Drury, Barnett was playing non-league football until relatively recently, wearing the shirts of Rushall Olympic, Telford United, Willenhall Town and Hednesford Town, before breaking into the Football League with Macclesfield in 2010.
"I think the lad Tyrone Barnett is an example like Drury," Jewell says. "He’s just had a big move to Peterborough.
"There are plenty of players who haven’t come through academies and sometimes these players who come into the game later are hungry because they know what it’s like to get up and go on a milk round or have to work on a building site or know what it’s like not to have a job.
"Sometimes they make hungrier players and they develop a bit later. They think ‘I don’t really want to go back to work at a proper job, I quite like this football lark’.
"The game is full of players like that. The boy Paul Taylor at Peterborough as well, he has a little bit of baggage [having faced a drugs ban earlier in his career] but he’s a really good player.”
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