Town boss Mick McCarthy says he has made bids for “quite a number of players” as the Blues look to strengthen ahead of the closure of the transfer window on Tuesday at 11pm. McCarthy says Town have made “millions-pound” offers with a second bid for Preston frontman Jordan Hugill of £2 million reported to have been rebuffed.
McCarthy is hoping some of the offers he has made will come off with several players having been targeted.
"I hope so but I really don’t know,” he admitted. "It’s proved every bit as difficult as I said it would be as the window opened. It is bids plural, on quite a number of players, actually.”
But he says he has so far continued to hit a brick wall: "They are millions-pound bids, but still nothing happening.”
McCarthy says owner Marcus Evans is backing him - "Yes, he is” - and that he’s happy with the bids that have been made.
"Unless somebody makes an unbelievable, multi-million pound bid and they go, ‘All right, happy days, we’ll have a bit of that because that’s nuts’,” he added.
"We’re not going to do that but we’ve made really good bids, I think, for players. But at the moment people are prepared to hold onto them and I still think come the last day somebody will go in with a really bonkers bid for somebody.”
Does he feel given the inflation in the division over the last two transfer windows no one is quite sure what to ask for a player?
"I haven’t got a clue. Jonathan Kodjia, Ross McCormack, Alex Pritchard, Scott Hogan at £15 million out of our league is just rendering me clueless as to what people are worth.
"It’s what they’re worth to spend on them, that’s exactly what it is. I really don’t know.”
He added: "It’s made it really difficult. I think the power’s with the seller now. It kind of used to be with the buyer when they weren’t that expensive - weren’t that expensive in inverted commas - but you knew if you went with £3 million or £4 million or £5 million to a Premier League club that’s what they’d be going for. Now it’s just 10s 20s, 30s and then, of course, the wages get increased.
"I’ve had a laugh this week, I’ve spoken to some Premier League lads and some lads who are higher up the league than me and they’ve said, "It’s tough at the minute’. I’ve said, ‘Really? I hadn’t noticed!’. There was me thinking it was a piece of piss.”
Will the window closing on a matchday - the Blues host Derby on Tuesday - complicate matters?
"Not really,” McCarthy continued. [Club secretary] Sally Webb, who does all the work behind the scenes, will still be doing that. If we’ve got a game and there’s something going on it’ll all have been arranged. That won’t affect it.
"It’s not me that does that. I’d say ‘Can we do this, we’ve got a player coming in’, somebody else looks after that.
"It wouldn’t alter where my focus is or what I’m concentrating on, it wouldn’t alter it at all. Makes it tougher for Sally as she’s got all the matchday stuff to do as well.”
Reflecting further on the bids which have been turned down, he added: "If you analyse where we were when we had bids for David McGoldrick, really good bids, and for Daryl Murphy, we turned them down.
"All our fans think that’s great ‘Well done’, that’s support for me, support for everybody turning £6 million or £7 million down. That’s what’s happening now, it’s just the same, the boot’s on the other foot, I’m afraid and it makes it tough.
"If they don’t want to sell them, there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re looking after their own bit.”
Does he feel that some clubs who might have been holding on for bigger offers might return to him to try to do a deal before the deadline if they haven’t received those hoped-for bids?
"It’s a bit of a risk doing that, it’s a bit of a gamble when we could have moved on and done something else because we think nothing’s going to happen,” he said.
"I don’t know what their tactics are, I think they probably just want to keep their players unless somebody blows them out of the water completely, and that’s just not going to happen.”
Meanwhile, McCarthy denied that Town had had a bid turned down by Colchester for winger Brennan Dickenson and wouldn't comment on whether he was interested in the 23-year-old: "I wouldn’t tell you if I was.”