Manager Paul Simpson confirmed once again that there is still room for more work to be done in the summer transfer window – but that nothing is likely ahead of the weekend as he remains focused on the visit of Exeter at this stage.
“We’ve got quite a lot of things going on,” he said. “The first thing I’ll say is that there’s nothing for any of our players.
“The second side of it is that we’re still trying to get players in. There’s probably not going to be anything before the weekend, but we’re discussing things we’re trying to do. As soon as there’s something to tell, I will let you know.
“We’re still doing a lot of digging around in the background and trying to get things done. I don’t expect anything to happen before the weekend, but I assure people we are trying to get the right players in.
“I don’t just want bodies to come in who are not going to be effective or improve us. We’ll keep working. We’ve missed out on quite a few already for all sorts of different reasons, but we’ll keep going and trying to get the right people in who will help us.”
And the recruitment, of course, is with the higher level of League One in mind.
“I do think it is harder,” he agreed. “There’s a small pool of players we’re looking at. The players that we’ve enquired about that we thought would have no chance of being involved at Premier League and Championship level, they are actually being involved.
“Clubs aren’t prepared to let them go out. I thought by this point they wouldn’t be involved in the first team and would be able to come out to us, but that’s not the case.
“We’ve just got to keep going, we’ve got lots of names in terms of targets. Unfortunately over the last six or seven weeks that list is getting shorter and shorter, but there are still names on it that we hope we might be able to do something with.
“There’s nothing in the free agent market. If you’ve got forward players with any chance of being effective, it’s really difficult. They’re not available, simple as that.
“The list of players we had at the start of pre-season who we were led to believe weren’t going to be involved at Premier League and Championship level, they have been, either started some games or been on the bench.
“We’re just having to be patient. It could be that we have to wait until the last day. I don’t like it going right up to the last minute but, if we have to do that, that’s what we have to do.
“We are still in a position where we have finances available to bring players in, we have ideas of what we want to do and we’re going to keep working.
“If we haven’t got them all in before that last day and we go to the deadline, it might have to be some packed lunches brought in and we’re sitting until we get them over the line.”
As ever, we have to ask about the possibility of any of the current squad heading out of the building.
“No, nothing at all,” he told us. “There’s a possibility we may consider letting some of the young players out on loan but, as it stands, there’s nothing going on.
“The Gabe Breeze situation is one to look at. I wouldn’t be comfortable going without a goalkeeper on the bench for the Reading game, we know he can’t be involved for that because of the loan agreement with Jokull.
“At the moment there’s nobody who has enquired about Gabe, so there’s nothing I need to concern myself with. I think Gabe has got a future ahead of him, but we do need to find match minutes for him.
“We’ll assess whether or not he gets minutes over the next couple of weeks in the games we’ve got coming up. It’s not something I’m concerning myself with at this moment in time, but we’ll wait and see what happens.”
On the Moxon interest that appears to have gone away, he told us: “Nothing more on that. We know about his contract offer, there’s been discussions, but there’s nothing changed on it.
“We talk all the time. I keep badgering the life out of him, because we all want him to stay for as long as we possibly can. He’s in a position where he has a year left on his contract and he knows what could happen if he goes on a free transfer next season.
“I’m not thinking that far ahead. I want him to stay, to carry on playing. We’re trying to reward him with a better contract for what he’s done so far and to keep him here.
“Whether anything changes we’ve just got to wait and see. Hopefully he just stays focused on his football and we can come up with some compromise further down the line.”