Portsmouth boss' recruitment demand after holding talks with season at a standstill

But the Blues boss admitted the global pandemic has seen the club’s plans to make summer additions stall.

Discussions were scheduled to take place this week over the policy moving forward when it comes to reshaping the squad.

Those efforts are now fraught with unforeseen difficulties, however, in the wake of the football season in England being suspended until April 30 at the earliest.

There’s obvious issues surrounding scouting with no games taking place, but Jackett sees no reason why work on tracking players and narrowing down lists of targets cannot continue.

The Pompey boss feels the process of bringing in potential targets has stopped rather than see them move away from being brought in - but he expects the wheels to be in motion again moving forward.

Jackett said: ‘We’re having a conference call this week about it.

‘Our list and contacts doesn’t necessarily change.

‘Nothing much has happened. Things have frozen rather than moved away from us, though.

‘That’s where it is and things are very much as they were two weeks ago.

‘It doesn’t change. We will discuss one, our team and two, their contractual situations within that.

‘Then with the possibility of Championship and League One football, we would talk through that.

‘It’s pretty tough. When is the window? When is the season? Financially, how are clubs going to be?

‘It hasn’t exactly been racing along in the last couple of weeks, though, I do agree with that.’

In the wake of the pandemic dominating the agenda and the uncertainty it’s created, Jackett admitted the focus has veered towards looking at the scenarios of players internally.

Pompey have eight players who have contracts coming to a close in the summer, with Lee Brown, Christian Burgess, Brett Pitman, Oli Hawkins, Brandon Haunstrup, Luke McGee, Adam May and Matt Casey seeing their deals come to a close.

On top of that, loan agreements with the parent clubs of Ross McCrorie, Cameron McGeehan, Steve Seddon and Sean Raggett will be at an end.

There is the additional dilemma of how football will come to terms with the issues of contracts ending on June 30, yet the season is almost certain to continue beyond that period.

Jackett added: ‘We won’t stop talking about the work we’re doing inside the club and contractual situations off the back of that. That’s an important thing.

‘The guys obviously haven’t been out watching games over the past couple of weekends.

‘So most of our recruitment talk has been internal of late.’