Town boss Kieran McKenna is keeping his cards close to his chest on whether young central defender Elkan Baggott will be handed his league debut in Saturday’s game at Rotherham but says he has decided on the team which will line-up against the Millers.
With George Edmundson still injured and Cameron Burgess suspended following his red card at Shrewsbury, there is a vacancy on the left side of the back three if McKenna opts to stick with the system he has favoured since taking over as manager at Town in mid-December.
Baggott is one option, while McKenna said last week that on-loan Brentford man Dominic Thompson can play that role in addition to operating at left-back or left wing-back.
The Blues manager was asked whether the aerial threat of Rotherham’s 6ft 4in-tall 24-goal top scorer Michael Smith has come into his thinking while ruminating on who will get the nod at the New York Stadium.
"I think he comes into it in the way every team does,” he said. "Their two forwards are very good players. They have other options on the bench as well but in Smith and [Freddie] Ladapo, who have played most of the games, they have two really good physical forwards, who have different attributes.
"Smith especially being very dominant in the air and Ladapo with his pace and a little bit more in one-v-ones.
"They have a really good, really strong front pairing and we have to prepare for that as well as we can, the same way we prepare for any team and their strengths.
"We’ll take account for that and deal with those threats as well as we can but in general our approach will always be to emphasise our strengths, make it our type of game and make it very difficult for them to impose themselves as they want to.
"In terms of replacing George and Cameron, we’ve decided that internally and we’ve looked at the different options that we have in terms of systems and how we’ve played this year and positions that people have played, and we’re pretty well settled on the team at the moment and I’ll keep that for ourselves and keep that in the group until the game on Saturday.”
Capped six times at full international level by Indonesia, Baggott, 19, who was left out of the U23s side which won 1-0 at Bristol City on Tuesday, has made only one senior appearance for Town, as a starter in the 2-0 home victory over Gillingham in what was then the Leasing.com Trophy in October 2020.
"He’s someone who’s trained with us for a good while,” McKenna said of the Colchester-based defender, who Town have kept in Suffolk despite receiving a call-up to an Indonesia U23s training camp last week.
"He’s had little opportunities before, I think he played in an EFL Trophy game before and he had his loan move out at King’s Lynn [at the end of 2020/21] and he’s had some good international exposure as well.
"So he’s a player that we really like, we see him as part of the long-term plan here. We also know, and he knows himself, that he has a lot of development still to do physically and in all other areas.
"We’ve spoken to him about his development pathway over the next couple of years and how we see that and I’ve had opportunities with him for those discussions with him and we’re very much on the same page with that. He’s a player that we can see being part of what we’re doing here in the future.
"At the moment he continues to be part of the group, he’s been in a couple of matchday squads and he’ll be in squads before the end of the season and there’s every chance we’ll see him on the pitch at some stage before the end of the season.”