Former Blue James Scowcroft says he doesn’t expect too many moves to take place this early in the summer with agents telling their players to take their time before deciding on their futures.
Scowcroft says players who or out of contract or just looking to move on will be being told not to be in any rush: "Agents will be telling players to sit tight because there’s no point grabbing an offer now. All the way through football, from the Premiership down, very few people get signed in May.
"I expect that it’ll all heat up at the end of June, early July and hopefully Ipswich will get their business done early on and everyone can bed in for pre-season.
"I think that’s the key as a manager and a player — if you are going to move have a good six or seven weeks with your club before you start the season. That’s a time when you get bedded in, get to know everybody and play a few games as well.”
With June still a few days away, Town have already been linked with plenty of players. While some of those will be tabloid stabs in the dark or agents trying to stir up interest in their clients, Scowcroft says it’s little surprise that lots of names are mentioned with manager Paul Jewell likely to be working through a long list of potential targets: "This time of the season it all gets a bit silly with all the rumours, especially with how the world works now with the Internet, Twitter and this, that and the other.
"I’m sure Ipswich will have a list of about 30 players, but they won’t sign those 30 players, it’ll probably only be four or five.”
The 36-year-old spent 2011/12 establishing himself in the media locally and further afield, both in print and on radio, something he says he enjoys: "I love it. I try and get to watch Ipswich as much as I can but I go to other clubs as well. I see games in the Premiership, in League Two, I’m up and down the country. I see a good spread, which I enjoy.”
The Bury St Edmunds-born striker or midfielder was one of the managers at Tuesday’s Portman Cup — beating a Fabian Wilnis-led side 6-2 - and isn’t ruling out a move from the press box into the dugouts at some stage: "When I finished playing it was something I wanted to do, coaching and getting the chance to manage.
"I think every player, and probably every supporter, thinks they can do it, but in the last year I’ve just done media stuff. In the next three or four years it will be something I’ll look at a bit more closely.”
Plenty of Scowcroft’s former Town team-mates are already working as coaches, several of them at Colchester’s Academy where Wilnis runs the U13 squad, and he expects more to do so: "Fabian’s gone down the road of coaching and hopefully a few more from my era will go into it as well, a lot of them have got a lot to offer.
"John McGreal’s into it now [at Colchester], Wayne Brown’s going to go full-time at Colchester next year, Mark Venus [is assistant manager to Tony Mowbray at Middlesbrough], then there’s Jim Magilton. Richard Wright will probably eventually be a goalkeeper-coach, Marcus Stewart is coaching [at Exeter], Jamie Clapham’s coaching [Lincoln’s Centre of Excellence].
"I always thought Matt Holland [also currently working in the media] would be a good coach but whether he’ll go down that road I don’t know.”
Meanwhile, exiting Blues midfielder Grant Leadbitter is reported to have been offered £12,000-a-week by Middlesbrough. The out-of-contract 26-year-old turned down a new deal with the Blues with Boro long understood to be his likely destination.