Ipswich Chief Ashton pleased with successful Premier League summer transfer window

Ashton explained to TWTD, "Although the process remains the same, we are now casting our line in a much larger pond with a significantly greater number of fish. Making mistakes with this larger pool of opportunities can lead to major challenges."

“So the due diligence and the detail has to be more and we work as a really close-knit unit and that close-knit unit is really me, (chief operating officer) Luke (Werhun) and Kieran (McKenna), that’s the tip of the sword, the three of us.

“Kieran will be the last call I have when I go to bed and he’ll be the first call when I wake up.”

He continued: “You mind-meld into one, you shut the outside world out and it is call after call after call. I’ve literally today got a new mobile because at the end of the transfer window, the other one just burnt out.

“You can’t not take any call and I think we probably were at a 70/80 per cent hit-rate of our number one targets. There were a couple that we moved on and you get down the line and you realise that it isn’t going to be doable and you have to change direction.

“It’s not easy and I have to manage the noise, I have to put the noise out because we’re linked with everybody. You have to understand, when we’re linked with someone, we’re linked with them for a reason; their agent is doing it to create a market, the club is doing it because they either want to sell or they want to buy, an agent is doing it to upset another agent to pinch the player.

“And my job is to get underneath that spider’s web with Luke to understand the real state of play and what’s going on. It’s a spider’s web that moves every hour and you’ve got to stay ahead of it.

“It’s tough, it’s been tough for every window, we’re going into January which will be tough and I think the other thing is that we have Financial Fair Play and we pushed to the limit.

“You talk about the transfer market, the transfer window was tough but remember two weeks before I’ve got to re-sign my manager and I’ve got some big dogs trying to steal our manager, so that had to be dealt with first because if I’m trying to sign a player, if he doesn’t know who my manager’s going to be, he’s not going to make a decision until we’ve got that done. There was a sequence of events, which were a natural process.”