Blues manager Paul Jewell says midfielder Grant Leadbitter has told him he wants to stay with Town beyond the end of his contract which is up this summer. Last night, the 26-year-old was linked with a move to fellow Championship side Middlesbrough.
Jewell, speaking prior to the Boro story breaking, said: "I spoke to Grant on Thursday. It was a football conversation really. Obviously we want to keep him and I just wanted to see what he was thinking.
"We had a long conversation and he told me that he’s keen to stay. So, we’ve just got to try and sort out the financial side of it, which is up to Marcus and Grant’s agent.
"But before we started talking, I just wanted to be sure. I think knew what the answer would be but I wanted to hear what he said about the football side of it and what his views are.
"If he’d said to me ‘I’ve been here three years, I need a change', there’s no point in going down the route of making offers, but he says he enjoys it here and I think you can see over the last six weeks he’s been terrific for us.
"I think the frustration for Grant is that he knows he can be a really good player and for different reasons it doesn’t seem to have happened for too long here. But he looks a different player to me at the moment, he’s full of confidence and he looks like he’s got goals in him.”
The Blues boss says the £2.65 million summer of 2009 signing from Sunderland has been helped by playing in a more confident team recently: "You can talk about players looking different players but he’s playing in a team that’s confident.
"In days gone by, even when I’ve been here, he’s looking round and people are not playing with confidence and that spreads like wild fire throughout the team. All of a sudden he’s now playing with supreme confidence and the team is and it helps everybody.
"You may think he looks a different player but he’s playing in a team which expects to win matches now rather than hoping not to get beaten.”
Leadbitter, like Carlos Edwards and Jason Scotland, will have to accept a reduced wage as the Championship moves to a break-even model next season. But Jewell says that’s not just an issue for the Blues but for all clubs at this level: "It is my problem but it’s the same problem that other managers have got as well. Football is suffering like everyone else out there. And Grant’s aware of that.
"I was talking to Tony Mowbray after the game the other night and he was saying they’ve got nine contracts up at Middlesbrough this summer and he doesn’t think any of them will get offered more money than they’re getting now, in fact most of them will be offered less. That’s the way it is.
"I’ll leave that up to Marcus and Simon Clegg to deal with. With the Financial Fair Play rules as well we have to cut our cloth.”
He says players will still be well paid but less than they are at present with more of an emphasis on earnings based on achievement: "We’re not going to pay the lads buttons but they have to be realistic.
"You want to reward people for success and I think in days gone by people have been rewarded too easily for being in the Championship.
"We want to reward our players — and certainly I get rewarded — if we’re successful. We want to pay our players for success just like in the rest of the club.”
Photo: Action Images
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