David Artell remains confident that his Crewe Alexandra squad will be in better shape at the closure of the January transfer window. The Alex boss is working on a number of potential targets and has already gone on to record to say that he expects at least one deal to be finalised this weekend ahead of the visit of Rotherham United.
The Alex boss says that he can only have learned from previous windows and says that this time, it seems more in our control than the summer when we lost four players in August. Tommie Hoban and Shaun MacDonald announced their retirement from football in the space of a few weeks, Charlie Kirk moved to Charlton Athletic and the club allowed Owen Dale to move to the Championship with Blackpool with just minutes remaining on the countdown clock.
Artell told crewealex.net: “I think that any club would have suffered losing four players in August. I don’t think anyone could envisage that happening and it would impact any club to lose four potential starters.
“We had two players retire, which we couldn’t have envisaged coming at the time, we sold Charlie and then we had what happened with Owen. It would impact any team and it didn’t give us much time to change it. I would think we are in better now than we were at the start of the season after that.
He added: “I think we will be in better shape at the end of the window. Hopefully, we will bring in some reinforcements to help the team and we can win enough games between now and the end of the season to give us a chance of staying up.”