Mick McCarthy believes Town’s upturn in form will benefit him when it comes to adding to his squad in the January transfer window. The Blues were at the foot of the Championship table when the 53-year-old took charge on November 1st but have climbed to 19th since then, eight points clear of the drop zone.

“We’ll be a lot better now that we’re not bottom of the league and people will be looking at us through different eyes, I would have thought,” he said.

“We’ve had some good results, they know it’s a good club but I’m not bothered which club it is if it’s bottom of the league, then people tend not to want to go there because they don’t want to get relegated. So, that’s a plus.

“The players that are here have put themselves under a bit more pressure because someone else might want to come in now.

“We’ll be able to compete [with other clubs], although I think that depends about who you’re talking about competing with really. There’ll be some that perhaps we can’t.”

McCarthy has said he wants to keep his loan players if he can with striker DJ Campbell top of his list. The 31-year-old striker goes back to QPR on Thursday with new Rangers boss Harry Redknapp keen to take a look at his player before making a decision on whether to allow him to leave.

The Town manager says no hard and fast deadline has been set by which time a decision will be made one way or the other: “Not really, not a certain time within January.

“I always tend to look at it in terms of what I would do. If I’d gone in [at QPR] I’d say ‘Hold on a minute, let me have a look at my own players and stick them in the team, I’m not happy with the ones I’ve got’.

“I deal with it how I would deal with it and generally that’s how it gets dealt with, with a bit of common sense.

“What does he think? Let’s have a look. If it’s not for him and he wants to do something else then I’m sure [that that being the case] there’s no doubt I will get a call and there will be a deal to be done, if we can do it, DJ can do it, the agent can do it and the club can do it. But when that will be throughout January, I don’t know.”

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