Deadline day for the Premier League and the Championship passed quietly at Portman Road with no approaches for Andre Dozzell or any of the other promising Blues’ youngsters, however, general manager of football operations Lee O’Neill confirmed there had been interest during the window.
As TWTD revealed last month, Norwich City and a number of other clubs had been showing interest in Dozzell but, speaking this afternoon, O’Neill said there had been no calls about the 20-year in the closing hours of the window: "No, there have been no calls about Andre today.”
Had there been offers for him earlier in the summer, any serious interest? "I think, being honest with you, we’ve got some really good young players and, as I’ve said before, if the phone wasn’t ringing about those young players, I would be a bit worried.
"We’ve had interest from a number of clubs about our young players. Fair dos to [owner] Marcus [Evans], we’ve obviously kept a lot of those players.
"And that’s the plan as we’re trying to help reinvest with the current players that we’ve got and give them the experience of playing 40 or 50 games, which they may not have had in previous seasons, and then we can evaluate whether they’re good enough or not. At the moment they’re all Ipswich Town players and that’s the plan going forward.”
He added: "You read the article from Marcus yesterday, we’ve tried very hard to protect our assets at the football club, that’s the young players, and we’ve got some experienced players.
"We want to try and learn from previous mistakes, build on those things. It’s not going to happen overnight, it’s going to take time.
"Yes, we are looking to strengthen areas of the squad, it may not happen before 5pm today but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen before September [2nd, the deadline for League One].
"Once the window closes this evening we’re in a very different position. I think we’re ongoing, nothing’s finalised.
"I think from my point of view, I will be glad when 5pm comes because obviously some of our assets we’ll have made sure they don’t go out of the building, so from that point of view I’ll be really pleased.”
O’Neill says that decisions may now start to be made on sending fringe players out on loan: "That will go on later on when we can work on the injuries coming back and make sure that they can sustain the level that we would like and obviously where we’re at with the squad in general. Then we’ll make decisions on which players may be able to go out on loan.
"Obviously we have looked at, for example, Luke Woolfenden’s situation last season, we had the right balance to be able to do that, so we need to make sure that’s in place.”
Today's deadline also passed with QPR not having made a renewed move for midfielder Alan Judge.