Town captain Luke Chambers has bemoaned the loss of striker Daryl Murphy to Newcastle last year and emphasised the need to find a suitable replacement in the January transfer window.
Murphy departed for the Geordie giants back in August and despite trying to bring in at least one new player to help bridge the gap Town have had to soldier on and now find themselves struggling to arrest a slide towards the wrong end of the Championship table.
Chambers said: "Losing Daryl Murphy, not much has been made of it, but that’s a massive, massive thing for us. We’ve had quite a lot of injuries this year and we have a small squad so they have taken their toll.
"Maybe we’ve been unlucky with that but the focal point of our play was down to playing up to Murph. You knew it wouldn’t come back very often.
"I’m not criticising any of our strikers because they are all very good players and different types of players. It’s not easy losing someone of Murph’s quality — he was 33 when he left and we got £3 million but if he was 25 he’d have been a £10 million player, especially in today’s market. It’s very difficult to replace someone of that ilk.”
Town have so far failed to reinforce their squad, although they have been linked with a host of potential targets and boss Mick McCarthy has admitted they currently have bids in for players at other clubs, who have still to give their response.
Chambers added: "My opinion doesn’t really matter but of course we need players. I think we had 11 fit players at the weekend, with first team experience that is.
"We’re a Championship club, a big club, we need players. It’s no secret. Everyone is crying out for a boost and the manager’s probably pulling his hair out trying to get players in.
"I don’t know who has the final say but we need back-up. I’m not happy sitting here, going through the motions and not achieving. I’m still ambitious and I want to achieve in this division and try to get promoted.
"I’ve got four or five years left, hopefully, in the game and I want to play at as high a level as I possibly can.
"So, yes, it’s no secret that we need players. We need some quality coming in and we need a boost.
"Two or three players walk in the door in January and all of a sudden everyone’s going ‘Here we go, we’re going to be moving forward, not just standing still and almost going backwards’.”
Meanwhile, Chambers has recovered from the knee injury that saw him miss last week’s FA Cup third round draw with non-league Lincoln, and is set to return to action in tomorrow’s home clash against a Blackburn side currently in the relegation zone. Then he will set his sights on Tuesday’s live-on-BBC replay against the National League leaders.
He added: "It’s pretty much a standard week in the Championship. Everyone will be looking at the result on Tuesday night and seeing how that goes, but I think we’re confident going into the weekend.
"It’s been a case of win, draw, lose, win, draw, win, lose, draw — pretty random. You never know what to expect with us at the minute and that’s something we need to eradicate from our game quickly.
"We need to go into the weekend with confidence and look forward to it. Blackburn have had a few good results, they’re scrapping for their lives and we don’t want to be going that way. We want to be brushing them aside and getting off to a positive start to next week.
"I don’t like missing games. I didn’t want to miss the game against Lincoln at the weekend but I’d had a sore knee for four or five weeks and if I’d continued to play I might have made it worse for the foreseeable future, so I had an injection in it. It wasn’t a case of it being better for me to miss that game, but the league is our bread and butter to be honest.”