Steve Bruce has not ruled out making a signing or two before Thursday evening’s transfer deadline.
Speaking at his first press conference at Hillsborough, the new Wednesday boss said: “We have one or two things in the pipeline and we’ll see how it goes over the coming hours.”
He also underlined that all signings would be down to him and that this had been agreed with the chairman before he accepted the job.
Bruce, who took training for the first time on Thursday, talked of his delight at taking up the role and admitted he was “like a young kid going to school again”.
Looking forward, he said: “We’re going to take our time and we’ll assess things. The slate is clean with the players, let’s get started and see where we go from here.”
Bruce talked of concerns over the amount of injury problems at the club over the last 18 months or so, of players who will soon be out of contract needing to show they deserve another deal and that having five or six centre forwards in the squad is too many.
He added: “We have got some good players at this club who have probably been under-performing – so we need to turn that around.”
Bruce said he had thought long and hard about whether he wanted to get back into management after being sacked by Villa but that when he got the phone call from chairman Mr Chansiri and then met him, the enthusiasm to want to bring success back to the club told him that this was the right move to make.
He said he wouldn’t have come to Wednesday if he didn’t think he could turn things around at Hillsborough and he spoke about the “amazing support” of the fans, which he experienced first-hand as manager of the Hull team when they beat us in the 2016 play-off final and then from afar in the FA Cup tie at Chelsea on Sunday evening.
The new manager was accompanied at the conference by Mr Chansiri and, in a strange move, the press soon moved questioning to whether the chairman had had any recent offers to buy the club – before Bruce brought matters back to the playing side.
Relating to Financial Fair Play obligations, Bruce said: “We understand FFP and it is not going to be easy because the chairman has spent a lot of money over the years. I am aware of that, we have to get on with it and try to repair it.”
He added: “We are not alone in FFP. There are probably 10 to 12 teams in the Championship under this restriction.”