Budget talk banned as Mansfield Town manager Adam Murray aims to compete at top end

Adam Murray is determined to have fans talking about the exciting players he is bringing in and not budgets this summer.
Adam Murray.Adam Murray.
Adam Murray.

Last summer all the talk was over chairman John Radford having halved the club’s budget – and a season of struggle followed.

But manager Murray today said that Radford and the board had been nothing but helpful with the names he had put forward so far and, in a week where four more of his players had left the club for better deals elsewhere, excitement rather than worry remained his strongest emotion.

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He also confirmed that, among his targets were two youngsters about to be released from Premier League clubs and that he had as many as half a dozen deals with new faces all but sealed.

“Worry is the last thing on my mind at the moment,” he said. “The last three months were worry. Now I am just excited.

“I know that people start panicking because we are not saying we are signing this player or that player. But as soon as deals are done we will let people know what’s happening.

“There are a couple of youngsters from the Premier League that I am speaking to whose season hasn’t yet finished. There are a couple we are waiting on and there are five or six that are virtually there.

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“You can understand that a lot of clubs at our level are all talking to the same players as we all want the best ones.

“All I can say is that the people we are talking to will affect this league at the top end. We don’t want to bring in anyone who will just go through the motions. I am not selling our football club as one that is going to be fighting relegation again.

“The club in general, the board, myself, my staff want to be at the top end of the league and that’s our aim.

“There’s no worry, no panic. All the areas we are looking at are taken care of with the targets we’ve got.

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“We only scored 30-odd goals last season. So, with all due respect to the players that were here last year, if I had kept all four or five strikers on the books, I deserved to be thrown out a window.

“We need players that can up our goal tally. We are going to be a team that attacks, a team that creates chances and goes and scores goals and we need people that are assured of doing that.”

Murray added: “I am not going to have a summer like last summer which was based on ‘the budget is poor and we can’t compete’. We can compete.

“The chairman is a driven man and he is putting pressure on me to go and achieve, but that’s a good pressure. It’s one where he says go and get me players that can make us a challenging side, so that’s what we will do.

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“What I have said is that I won’t go out there willy-nilly and say look – we’ve got X-amount. I am aware in the last few years we have probably spent money in the wrong areas, and I believe if you spend your money wisely you will get good value and a good player.

“We are looking to get players in that can play a certain way, that can play expansive, are intelligent and technically very good, and we also want to bring that experience in which I think we lacked last year.

“We’ve got a good base of young kids, but they are not going to grow unless we bring that experience in as well.

“It will be part of our recruitment that we bring in potential, we bring in experience and we bring in proven players.”

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On the Premier League targets, he added: “I have got to be respectful to certain people. To be fair to them, they are being professional and they are still working. It’s not fair to nail things down while they are still in a job.

“Whether these deals come off is down to the negotiations which we can’t really start until they stop playing.

“If I am being honest I have looked at some of them for a couple of years now. It was just a matter of time and waiting until they were ready to make the step into full-time men’s football at League Two, which is very different to playing U21s games. You’ve seen with Callum (Elder) if you get the right one, they can really affect this league.”