Cook on January

There will be some spending, but not much:

"Mark has some thoughts and some plans but they are by no means as aggressive as they have been in the past.

"We have a great squad of players that are just getting bedded in and we might find there is more speculation about what we might do than what we actually do.

I'm quite pleased to hear this. I know I've said this before but in one sense it has been quite difficult supporting City in recent years. So much of being a football fan concerns forming relationships with individual players and when we get a whole new squad in every six months that becomes quite a bit harder.

And then there's the problem that it is difficult to buy well in January. We made some crucial improvements in January 2009 but we're now at the point where I'm not sure that anyone we can buy would significantly improve our team. Maicon's obviously better than Zabaleta but he's not exactly going to leave Inter this winter for City. I suppose Matthew Upson would probably be a marginal upgrade on Joleon Lescott but then Hughes might not want to cast off Lescott this quickly.

We could well bring in one or two more players - another right back, a creative midfielder, possibly another holding midfielder - but anything on the scale of summer 2009, summer 2008, summer 2007 or even January 2009 seems pretty unlikely in January 2010.