Town new boy Ben Pringle has dismissed claims that he rejected a move to Portman Road last summer.
Pringle, 26, has been recruited on an initial one-month loan deal from Championship rivals Fulham and after making his debut in the recent 2-1 defeat at Bristol City he is set to make his first home appearance in tonight’s clash with top-of-the-table Hull.
But reports that he turned down a move to Ipswich in favour of joining Fulham when his contract at Rotherham expired last summer are well wide of the mark, he insisted.
Asked about interest in him during the 2015 close season, Pringle said: "There wasn’t a lot really. I know there have been a few people on Twitter saying I turned Ipswich down and things like that but it never got to that point.
"I knew Mick was interested. One of my good friends at Rotherham speaks to Lids [Town fitness coach Andy Liddell] quite often so we knew about it then, although nothing came from it.
"At the time, when I was leaving Rotherham , I was open to pretty much anything, so it was just a case of who showed interest enough and who wanted to do it. Fulham were the frontrunners and I went there.”
But although the left-footed midfielder was a regular under the man who signed him, Kit Symons, another change of manager at Craven Cottage — ex-Watford boss Slavisa Jokanovic took charge soon after Christmas — left Pringle out in the cold.
He added: "You get to that point where you think ‘Enough’s enough, I need to play games’. With Rotherham I played the majority of the games for three seasons so it was maybe nice to have a little bit of a rest for a couple of months, not playing and just training.
"But you get to the point where you’ve had enough of that and you want to be playing. Every player would be like that I think. I spoke to the 72 managers they had in the last month at Fulham and I spoke to plenty of different people.
"There was only so often I could knock the door down and ask ‘Where do you see playing?’. When the loan window opened it was pretty straightforward really for me to go out.
"I started the first 11 or 12 games and we were just outside the play-offs and it was by no means a case of me not being good enough to play or anything like that. But Kit went and Peter Grant came in, Stuart Gray came in and then Jokanovic came in.
"I think the dynamics of the team is to get the ball down and play through the middle. They don’t really have wide players standing on the byline, putting the ball in, which sounds old school but it’s a category you could put me in.”
Pringle is determined to make the most of his time with Town, adding: "I’m not really looking too far forward. It’s up to Fulham because that’s who I play for and that’s all I can say really.
"I know I’ll enjoy my time here and beyond that we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”
Photo: ITFC