Opinion: Transfer frustration affecting Blues preparation

So, that’s that. Pre-season is complete and Birmingham City begin their 2017/18 Championship campaign at Portman Road in less than a week.

Pretty much all of the talk since Harry Redknapp agreed his one-year deal with the club has been about transfers.

We’ve gone through an endless list of names but Blues have still only brought three players in this transfer window (four if you include the permanent signing of Craig Gardner).

All three signings – David Stockdale, Marc Roberts and Cheikh Ndoye – look to be really impressive acquisitions and we’ve done well to get them in.

But, by this stage, Redknapp clearly wanted at least two or three more additions to the squad.

I was at St. Andrew`s on Saturday for the final pre-season game against Swansea and attended Redknapp`s post match interview with the press.

The way he was with his answers made me think a lot. He’s clearly frustrated and displeased to not yet have the bodies in the building that he’s been trying so hard for.

What I’m getting from it is that Blues aren’t fully prepared going into the season. We have just five more days before we take on Ipswich and Harry seemed keen to talk about the limited options he has available to him.

He revealed that Ryan Shotton would like to leave the club and that his departure would leave him with just two centre backs.

He also said that he has no striking options apart from Lukas Jutkiewicz and Clayton Donaldson. It was almost a plea to the owners to make his point heard.

Redknapp also told BluesTV that he hopes to get a player in by Monday (today). A player that would be a ‘fantastic signing` according to the Blues boss- perhaps this has now happened by the time this piece is out, fingers crossed.

The performance against Swansea was described as ‘OK` by Redknapp and, like a lot of us, he’s quite clearly not convinced that this team has enough to challenge for promotion.

In fact, at the moment, I’d say we’re quite a way off. But there’s still of course the fact that the transfer window still has a long way to go before it closes.

It just would’ve been better in terms of preparation to get the players in for pre-season but you can’t always have what you want- Redknapp is certainly finding that out.

My worry is that the more Blues fans and Redknapp get frustrated on the transfer front, the more it may impact what`s going on with the current group of players on the pitch.

I just hope that things begin to pick up and Redknapp starts getting the success in the window that he deserves as it`s certainly not down to a lack of trying.
One thing’s for certain though- if he does get the targets in that are being mentioned, then Blues will be in for one interesting season.