\n The Blues hijacked Birmingham City’s attempts to land the former Middlesbrough man on loan earlier this week.\n<\/p>\n
\n There were fresh reports, ahead of Town starting their Championship season with a hard-fought 1-1 draw at Birmingham tonight, that Turkish side Trabzonspor were now looking to swoop for the 29-year-old.\n<\/p>\n
\n “To be honest, I’ve not been across it massively,” said McKenna. “My latest understanding was it was sort of a deal that all parties were trying to push through and wanting to do and\u00a0I’ve not heard anything to the contrary for that. I’m waiting for some feedback from the club.”\n<\/p>\n
\n Town did sign Jens Cajuste yesterday, the Swedish midfielder returning for a second loan spell from Napoli. He was registered in time to feature tonight, but didn’t travel with the squad.\n<\/p>\n
\n “It definitely came too soon for him,” said McKenna.\u00a0“He arrived really late. I’ve only seen him for about 15 seconds since he since he joined. I’ve had plenty of phone calls.\n<\/p>\n
\n “He’s going to need a little bit of time, hopefully not too long, getting up to speed. To be honest, he’s not had a proper pre-season with Napoli. So it’s going to be a balance between getting him\u00a0contributing as quickly as possible and also setting him up for a long, hard season. We’ve got to get that balance right over the next few weeks.”\n<\/p>\n
\n Town star Omari Hutchinson also didn’t feature tonight. Ipswich have rejected \u00a335m bids from Brentford and Nottingham Forest for the England U21 international this summer and he subsequently didn’t travel for a pre-season friendly in France as he was ‘mentally not in the right place’.\n<\/p>\n
\n On his latest absence, McKenna explained: “He’s not very well. He had a throat infection. It’s nothing untoward or anything like that.\u00a0He was in training Monday and Tuesday, getting ready for the game, then had to go home with a temperature and a throat infection. Hopefully he’ll recover over the weekend.”\n<\/p>\n
\n Jaden Philogene also wasn’t in the Blues’ matchday squad, having suffered an ankle injury in the last game of pre-season.\n<\/p>\n
\n “We feared that it might be a little bit longer, but\u00a0he’s progressing pretty well,” said McKenna, whose team go to League Two side Bromley for a League Cup first round tie on Tuesday night. “We have to see how he goes into next week.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Blues hijacked Birmingham City’s attempts to land the former Middlesbrough man on loan earlier this week. There…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4100],"tags":[94,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-329520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114996637226390816","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}