That ‘when does the transfer window open’ clock continues to count down and, with every passing tick, another question is jotted down in the notepad for the next time we speak to the manager.
Here’s what he had to say when he was pressed on it once again this week.
“If we do anything in the window we want to make sure it makes us better,” he insisted. “At the moment we deal with the games we’re playing and Greg Abbott is constantly looking at options and speaking to people about who could be available.
“We’re hoping we’ll get to a point where we could go to the board to give them a problem with showing them what we want to do, and we’ll see if they can help from there, as they have done so far.
“I’ve spoken to John Nixon and he’s told me that the board are really happy with where we are, and that they want to do whatever they can to help us to keep it going. He wants me to tell them what we’re thinking about and they can look at it from there.
“What I won’t ever do is spend money on players just for the sake of it. It has to be to make things better.
“Now, it might not always work out that way, but it’s on me to try to get more of that side of things right than we get wrong.”
“With that in mind I’ll only ever spend what’s affordable, I won’t put the club at risk, but if we see something and it’s within our budget I can guarantee you that we’ll do what we can to make it happen,” he added.
“We’re in a good place and our job is to make sure we keep progressing. We have spoken to clubs, but there’s nothing concrete right now. There’s possibilities for loan players and for other moves, but we just have to wait and see.
“I think the work we want to do narrows down every week as we get closer to January. We’ve highlighted the areas we think we need to strengthen.
“The problem is it changes week to week. You pick up an injury, we’ve had a couple of niggly things this week, we’re waiting to see how they are, so it just keeps changing.
“The whole thing evolves, one week myself and Greg will sit down and discuss players who are available, the week after he’ll come and say I’ve just found out this one’s also available who’s on our list, which one would you rather take.
“It’s constantly evolving and I’m sure come January 1 it will have evolved a few times more, and we’ll just see from there what we can and can’t do.”
“The pleasing thing is that we’ve had no interest in ours,” he added. “Maybe that’s down to the fact I don’t take those calls because I don’t want to be losing players.
“Unless we get a call or enquiry about anybody, we aren’t going to be going out of our way to be getting anybody out of the building.”