Brian McDermott is meeting Shaun Harvey and David Haigh to see what funds he has to pursue his transfer targets, so this might be the day we find out whether GFH really do have the resources to take the club forward.

McDermott told the Yorkshire Post “We have had things in place for quite a while now. I have a meeting (today) for us to get the go-ahead to really nail these deals down. I want as many of the players in as I can for pre-season. Shaun has been working hard speaking to agents and I have spoken to players and stuff. And what I have found is that players are very, very keen to come to Leeds. I now need clarification from the owners that the deals will be done.”

The manager’s targets are thought to include former Reading players Noel Hunt and Matt Mills, though we’ve already declined to pay the £1 million fee that Mills’ current club Bolton have been asking, which may not be a good sign. We are likely to ask to take the player on a one season loan, but that would still leave the issue of the £25,000 a week that Mills is currently being paid, an amount that is outside our current wage structure.

Bolton are keen to offload Mills to free up some cash for rebuilding their squad, so we might get away with a bit of hard bargaining, but the trotters are likely to accept any offer of a transfer fee if they should get one from any other club. The Bolton News think that Nottingham Forest have also enquired about the possibility of a loan, although they have yet to make a formal bid.

Yesterday the Yorkshire Post claimed we were interested in Hearts 19 year old Kevin McHattie, who has played for Scotland at under-21 level. This seems unlikely to me as McHattie is a left back and we already have Adam Drury and Steven Warnock at the club, which was supposedly the reason we didn’t make a bid for old boy Ian Harte.

But it’s possible that we could be looking at a couple of other Hearts players, in the same way that 12 months ago we were picking over the carcass of Portsmouth. The Edinburgh club have just gone into administration with debts of £25 million as a result of the excessive wages paid by owner Vladimir Romanov, whose Lithuanian bank has now gone out of business. So they have now put their entire first team squad up for sale in a desperate attempt to trim the wage bill and raise cash, so there will be bargains to be snapped up.

Whatever McDermott’s intentions are, let’s hope he comes out of this meeting with the backing he was looking for, so he can get on with the serious business of preparing the squad for a promotion challenge in the coming season.

Photo: Action Images

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