Below are selected highlights from Wednesday afternoon’s press conference. You can find the full audio above or in your We Are Terriers podcast feed.
Jack Conlon (BBC Radio Leeds): I’ll start with the three extra additions on deadline day. I’ll start with Bobby Wales and Ryan Hardie first — just how pleased are you to get those over the line and what are they going to offer?
Yeah, delighted with them, but also the business I think that was done in January with the additions that were made.
Starting with Bobby, he’s one that we’ve been tracking a little while, to be fair, and done a decent amount of work on, so I had a decent understanding of him. So again, I think he’s a good addition for us.
Then obviously Ryan as well, he’s someone that I’ve coached against numerous times, and I know what qualities he brings and how proven he is at the level. Obviously, with Bojan [Radulovic] getting injured, we knew it was an area of pitch that we needed to add to in terms of not just depth, but also quality as well, which I’m delighted we’ve been able to do.
JC: On the flip side, Ruben Roosken and Herbie Kane leaving the club — what’s the rationale behind those decisions?
I think there are two aspects. I think Herbie, when you look at it, obviously coming back from an injury…I had a good chat with Herbie. I like him, I like some of his qualities, but I was quite straight and honest with him, I think, in terms of game time might be quite tough to come by, just given the volume of players that we’ve got in there.
Naturally, when you come in you go with people, and he’s working back to fitness, so there was people ahead of him. So for me, then the decision, do you keep him around for the final third of the season to be part of it, or actually, do we go right, ‘let’s get fit, let’s game some minutes, let’s have a good look at him playing games and and see how he does on that?’ So that was the decision there.
And similarly, I think Ruben, when you look at it, he wasn’t making squads with Bali [Mumba] coming in, and [Mickel Miller back again].
I think it was a terrific opportunity for the club as well, and that was ultimately the decision that we made in terms of us being really happy with what we’ve got, and at the same time, the deal was really, really good for us.
JC: How do you rate the window overall and the squad you’ve been left with, albeit, I appreciate you were only here for half of it?
Really pleased, really pleased, with first and foremost, what was here.
I came here to work with a group that was here currently, and I’ve been really pleased with how the group we’ve got has responded.
Then if you if you go through it and what we’ve managed to add in terms of slight differences in profile and physicality, which I think the group needed.
So, yeah, I’ve been really pleased with the window, and the biggest bit is I’m pleased with the squad we’ve now got going into the final three months of the season.
Steven Chicken (We Are Terriers): You’ve actually got two centre forwards this weekend, with Bobby in as well [as Dion Charles]. Is it a case for you now weighing up whether you want them both on from the start or you want one from the bench so you can switch them out?
I can’t be telling you what I’m thinking before a game!
No, of course. We obviously spoke last week around what I felt we needed, and that was obviously an area to pitch that we needed options.
That’s why I quite like, if you look at the three that we’ve got, Ryan [Hardie] is obviously back [from injury] soon, but with Ryan, with Bobby, with Dion, I think you’ve got three different types, different profiles, which maybe we can cause the opposition, different problems in different ways.
So whether it be one up, whether it be two up, I think we’ve already shown in games that we’re happy to change and we’re not fixed and set on it that it has to be one up top. You want elements of the players to be fluid.
So I’m delighted that we’ve got a variety of profiles at that end of the pitch, and it gives me different options and different ways of using them.
