Boss Mick McCarthy expects Arsenal’s interest in Tyrone Mings to motivate the left-back to play even better than he has up to now. Yesterday, Gunners boss Arsene Wenger confirmed that he was keeping tabs on the 21-year-old.
"I hope it affects him and he plays even better because he knows people are coming to watch him,” McCarthy said of Mings, who is contracted until June 2017.
"How about thinking it’s a really positive thing when you’ve got Arsenal and Arsene Wenger looking at you?
"If I’d got Arsene Wenger looking at me as a player and thinking I should play for him, I’d be thrilled. My chest would be pumped out, I’d be flying. They could send all the scouts they like down. I think Ty’s like that. I think it will have a positive effect on him.”
Was he annoyed about Wenger speaking publicly about his player? "That doesn’t bother me. He gets asked and I’m not a whinger, I don’t whinge about things like that.
"It’s part of the process, and [players] know scouts come down, so what’s the point of him telling lies anyway and saying ‘no’?
"I think it’s a real positive for us and for Ty, so I don’t think anything other than that he’s probably doing us a favour - he’s got a player motivated.
"Ty wants to get in the Premier League with us. But you know, at the end of the season if it doesn’t happen and Arsenal want to come and throw shed-loads of money at him, there’s not a lot we can do except negotiate and see what happens.
"We’ve seen already that Cressy went, we replaced him with a left-back, who Arsenal now apparently are looking at.
"Leicester wanted Didz and he didn’t go, so it’s just part of the gig, part of my job. It doesn’t worry me.”
He added: "I don’t anticipate losing anybody in January though. If we are in the mix, no one will be going anywhere as far as I am concerned.”
It’s been a remarkable rise for Mings, who joined the Blues two years ago this month from non-league Chippenham for just £10,000 - £5,000 when he moved, plus another £5,000 when he made his Town debut, as well as a pre-season friendly which was played at the start of 2013/14.
The Evo-Stik League Southern side don’t have a sell-on for the one-time Southampton trainee, who wasn’t even formally contracted to them when former Blues U18s coach and defender Russell Osman, whose son Toby was also at Chippenham, recommended him to McCarthy, who quickly signed him up after a trial.
The Town boss says no one anticipated quite such fast progress: "Nobody thought that, I didn’t think that. I knew we’d got potentially a good player, that’s why I was happy to let Cressy go and fulfil his ambitions. I knew we’d got a good left-back.”