Sky Blues boss Mark Robins looked back on a week of incomings and returns to his squad ahead of this weekend’s clash with Huddersfield Town.
City welcomed the arrivals of Luke McNally and Sean Maguire to the first team, as well as Under-21s recruit Riccardo Di Trolio.
Within the camp already, Matty Godden, Josh Eccles and Tyler Walker returned to full training, whilst Kyle McFadzean was back on the grass.
Robins spoke to the press this morning and reflected on the week’s news…
The arrival of Luke McNally…
“He’s young. He has played in Ireland and came into oxford and worked with Karl Robinson for a while and then last summer moved to Burnley, working under Vincent Kompany.
“He’s a really strong player, good athleticism, tall and aggressive in both boxes and he still has quite a bit to learn.
“He’s really intelligent and a nice lad and we look forward to seeing what he can do because he is a bright prospect.”
Sean Maguire coming in…
“Sean hasn’t played enough football recently and an opportunity came to take him, and we were looking to do someone else as well, but Sean came on the radar and that gives us another body.
“He knows the Championship, but we have to help him get up to speed and when we do, he is a talent, and we look forward to seeing what we can do with him.
“He is different to what we’ve got. We have a decent complement of strikers, and we just need to get them all back up to speed.”
Anymore incomings this month…
“We’ve got plates spinning. But we will see. Essentially we’re done this window, unless the one falls that we’re waiting for.
“Whether that’s now or the summer, it doesn’t make much difference, but we will see.”
Facing Huddersfield this weekend…
“We’ve got 19 games left. This is a big one against Huddersfield because we’ve lost the last two league games.
“Huddersfield have a really strong squad and they’ve changed things a bit.
“It’s a really good club that I know well and it’s a surprise where they are because they have a really good squad.
“They’ve got some really good players, but they’ve had some injuries and some of them are coming back now.
“They have strength in depth and good numbers. You can guess what they’re going to do, you can look at that but it’s their prerogative.
“For us it’s about us and going out and performing to a level. Some of the performances, certainly against Burnley and some of the performance against Norwich was actually really good.
Players returning to training…
“Kyle McFadzean will start training Monday. He is back on the grass now and is working his way back up to work with us.
“That gives us the full complement of centre-halves hopefully from next week.
“We have Josh Eccles, Matty Godden and Tyler Walker training with us again. They’ve been training this week, they’ve been out for a while, so I will check on them.
Looking to get back to keeping clean sheets…
“We’ve got to get better at what we were doing earlier this season that meant we were keeping clean sheets.
“We’ve looked at the stats and the stats suggest we were giving up more chances before when we were keeping those clean sheets, but what we’re doing now is giving up less chances but they’re better quality.
“That’s about mindset and desire to stop the opponent and we have to do that and that’s part of the responsibility of everyone, not just the defenders.”