Town boss Mick McCarthy has confirmed that he is looking to sign Chippenham Town defender Tyrone Mings, as reported by TWTD yesterday. The 19-year-old played for a Blues XI in a 2-1 friendly defeat to a Nike Academy side on Monday.
Town say a deal has been agreed with the Evostik Southern League club and once the paperwork is tied up the defender will be available for selection immediately with the transfer window not applying at that level. Mings is at Portman Road today and is expected to sign on the dotted line this afternoon.
McCarthy: "He played in the U21 game the other day and I’m looking to sign him.”
Mings has been playing alongside Russell Osman’s son Toby at Chippenham and the Blues boss says the Blues U18s coach was partly responsible for bringing him to the club: "Russell and Steve McCall.
"We invited him in to play and he did well on Monday. He’s a left-back or left-sided centre-back, he’s 6ft 3in tall.”
Bath-born Mings spent many years with Southampton’s academy before moving to Bristol Rovers and then into non-league football with Yate Town before joining Chippenham — where his father Adie had been manager and then director of football before recently joining Chelsea's scouting set-up — at the start of the season.
McCarthy added: "He’s come through an academy so that helps, he’s been brought up at a club. He’s not just somebody who has come through and we’ve suddenly found him. I was really pleased with him on Monday.”
The Town manager says he’s not a player he sees purely as someone for the development squad: "We’ll see how he does. I think [he has a chance of pushing on], just having seen him for an hour and 10 minutes in a game. I decided after five minutes.”
The team which faced the Nike Academy, in which new Town scout Dave Bowman works as a consultant, was made up the Town first team squad members who haven’t recently been in the team.