Mark Robins Talks On Coventry City’s Set-Back recruitment
Coventry City transfer news from CoventryLive as Sky Blues boss discusses what the club have been up against in transfer window
Mark Robins has explained the problems Coventry City are encountering with their biggest and arguably most important summer recruitment drive in years.
The Sky Blues boss has made five new signings so far in a slow going process that has been frustrating for the manager, not least because he was forced to take a thin-looking senior squad to the club’s pre-season training camp in Portugal last week – a period he had hoped would be used to bed in new players in an annual bonding exercise.
Providing an update on the recruitment progress, Robins revealed he wants 10 more new signings before the transfer window closes on September 1, with the likelihood that all of those won’t be done by the time City kick off the new season at Leicester in just over a fortnight.
“There’s still a long way to go,” he said. “We have two or three weeks to the start and I can’t impress enough to everyone that we are working so hard to get these things over the line. And I have to stress that it’s a difficult, difficult task.
But I’m excited and hopeful that we can push on and bring some good quality through the door, as we have done with the signings so far.”
Asked what issues the club have faced, and whether it’s a case of setting the bar that much higher in terms of the quality of targets that’s proving problematic, he told CoventryLive: “I think the fact that we’re going for better players means there’s more interest in them, and we’re still not able to compete with the wages. We can’t do that, we can’t go stupid. What we have done, and what [owner] Doug’s (King) allowed us to do, is go higher than we have been, and that’s brilliant. So we will improve things.”
City are clearly looking to buy plenty of targets rather than take free transfers, and that brings another problem following the £20m sale of star striker Viktor Gyokeres.
“What I know, and what everyone thinks, is that you’re sat on a pile of money that they are trying to take off and extract from you,” he said. “That ain’t going to happen because you can’t overpay for people. Not stupidly anyway. But quality players cost decent money and the good thing about it is Doug is prepared to back that. And the players that I am looking to bring in, the players that Dean (Austin) and his team have brought forward and that we all agree can make us better, are really exciting players.
“So we are going to try to do that, and that’s really important. Whilst we want to hit the ground running, it’s difficult. But the coaching staff and everyone at the club have been brilliant. The players have been looking around and saying, ‘where are the players,’ but they are starting to drip through.”
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