ALAN Lee is so confident he is staying with Ipswich Town he doesn't even have an agent.With Jon Walters, Danny Haynes and Billy Clarke pressing for a first team place, and Jim Magilton keen on securing Francis Jeffers on a permanent basis, there have been murmurings that Lee will be sold in the summer, despite hitting a personal record of 17 goals in one season.

By Derek Davis

ALAN Lee is so confident he is staying with Ipswich Town he doesn't even have an agent.

With Jon Walters, Danny Haynes and Billy Clarke pressing for a first team place, and Jim Magilton keen on securing Francis Jeffers on a permanent basis, there have been murmurings that Lee will be sold in the summer, despite hitting a personal record of 17 goals in one season.

Coupled with a falling out in January over a trip to Amsterdam, the rumour mill has been in full swing. There have been assertions by the Blues boss that he does not plan to sell Lee, although he admits he would if he was offered silly money and a couple of clubs have made tentative inquiries about him.

But the former Burnley, Rotherham and Cardiff striker, who also had loan spells at Port Vale and Torquay after starting his career as a trainee at Aston Villa, has no desire to leave Portman Road.

Lee told the EADT: “I know I don't want to go. How many players do you know that want to leave a club and don't have an agent? I don't have an agent so that will tell you something.

“I can tell you I want to play in the Premiership and I want to do that with Ipswich.

“There has been no indication that I will be sold, and I want to stay, but sometimes things are taken out of your hands.”

Lee had set his heart on reaching 20 goals but has missed out in a few games of late as Magilton looked at pairing Walters and Jeffers, although he scored his 17th goal of the campaign at Elland Road on Saturday.

A third career hat-trick against his old club Cardiff on Sunday would be a bonus after his best goal-scoring season since he was at Rotherham in 2003 and, while he is not expecting to score that many, he will not be going out for an end-of-season stroll, even if it is a meaningless game in terms of league position.

He said: “It is never a nothing game for me and I want to add to my tally of goals and it wouldn't matter who I was playing against. I won't be putting in any special effort just because it is Cardiff, because I put in my maximum every game.

“There will be no extra training, no change to my attitude or preparation. In the same way, I won't get any extra pleasure if I go against them than I would scoring in any game for Ipswich.

“You saw what it meant for me to score in the Leeds game and that wasn't because it was Leeds, it was because I had scored.”

Lee is looking for another start on Sunday against his former club the Bluebirds, where he scored just 10 league goals in more than 80 games in an injury-racked stay.