Steve Bone

You'd expect some of those type of players to be loans, whether they are from Premier League under-21 teams and that sort of thing.

We've gone down that route, haven't we, a few times.

International players as loanees?

Yeah, it's quite possible.

I suppose we're seeing that with Yang at the moment, aren't we?

We've loaned him.

not probably expecting to be able to buy him but with the hope of him doing something for us and I suppose if you loan a player from a top level club and they do well

Okay, you may not be able to then keep that player, but if you've shown yourself to be a club who can bring players on, give them a chance and develop them and improve them, as you might say we did with Freddie Potts, not an international player, but did it with Freddie Potts last year from West Ham, and look at him now, and look at West Ham.

It's going to make other clubs more willing to loan players to you, isn't it?

They're going to see that...

Pompey is a good club to loan a player to for a year or half a year, which then opens up the field a little bit in terms of the pool of players that you could potentially bring in.

But in terms of January, I do think we're going to see a couple of permanent signings as well.

I think the manager wants to make an immediate improvement to what we've got.

I think he sees the need for that because of some of the struggles we've had in the first half of the season.

I was interested to read a bit from him a day or two ago in which he said they've now got the long list down to a short list.

And I started to read on and he said, yeah, we've got it down to four or five players.

And I thought that was going to be a full stop there.

He's four or five players for every position.

That doesn't seem to be a very short list to me.

That's about 36 players or something.