My budget? That's a closely guarded secret - from me.

For a man that says he has been told not to discuss his playing budget Gary Simpson talks an awful lot about it. Rather he talks a lot about the fact that he doesn’t know what it actually is.

To be honest I don’t suppose he’s on his own in not knowing precisely what the budget will be for the forthcoming season. It depends on season ticket sales and also, one would suppose, on how the season starts. If City have another good start to the season and gates are up come Christmas the board would presumably be more disposed to invest in recruitment to shore up a bid for the P thing.

Anyway, positively, Simpson told the Echo he was on the lookout for a partner for Ben Tomlinson, a striker who certainly looks the part but whose frustration when things don’t go his way often sees him incur the displeasure of the referee:-

"We need more goals and we need someone to compliment Ben Tomlinson, so we certainly need another striker.
"But we need to get goals from other areas too because, at the end of the day, goals win matches."

Indeed they do and we’d have won quite a few last season if we could have just got the ball in the net, sometimes it all looks rosy and then that final touch isn’t there:-

"I'm trying to put a bit of quality together to give more goals to give us a chance next season."

Amen to that.

"I'm speaking to quite a few players, but I'm playing blind a little bit because I don't know what I'm going to get in terms of the budget,"
"It's a difficult one at the moment because the retained list has got to come out this week.
"My budget is like a sliding scale at the moment. What I will get depends on a few factors and I'm conscious of that. There's one or two that I'd like to keep.
"And there's one or two that I might not be able to keep now, but they might still be with us come the start of the season.
"I might not be in a position, at this moment in time, too offer them this, that or the other because I don't know what I'm going to get."

Thanks Gary. I think you did mention that.