GARY Rowett believes that it would be difficult for Millwall to use the free agent market to sign a striker after failing to do so in the January transfer window, although he refused to rule out the possibility.
One of the Lions’ play-off rivals, QPR, signed Chris Martin on a free transfer after he was released by Bristol City last month. It prompted some supporters to ask whether Rowett could look to strengthen his squad in the same way, especially since their move for Hibernian’s Kevin Nisbet fell through late on.
However, Millwall are unlikely to make a move for a free agent given the small size of the market and the fact that most new additions would likely need a number of weeks to get up to speed before being able to contribute to the club’s play-off push.
“I think that’s quite a difficult one,” Rowett told NewsAtDen.
“Someone like Chris, he’s a top striker, I’ve worked with him. But if you’re bringing someone in that hasn’t played that much football and hasn’t started regularly, you know you’ll have to build that fitness level up and get them up to a point where they can go and start and impact games.
“For us, we know where we are, we know what we’ve done. We couldn’t get the type of striker that we wanted, which is the case in a lot of windows, you can’t always get what you want.
“We don’t just want to take a different type of striker that doesn’t necessarily fit what we want to do. We don’t want to take someone who’s a striker and just a striker, we want to take someone that fits our profile and fits what we want to do in the long-term.
“I believe that we’ve got goals in the forward line, I believe we’ve got different options in the forward line. I spoke about it after the window, and we’ll have to find those ways of trying to win games.
“Regardless of whether we go and find someone as a free transfer, we’re still going to be sitting here asking whether we scored enough goals and whether we won enough games. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that other than waiting until the end of the season and seeing where we finish.”
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