SAM Allardyce has offered rival boss Kevin Keegan a piece of financial advice ahead of Saturday's Maine Road derby.

At the end of a week in which Manchester City had cause to deny rumours that their manager had quit in a row over transfer funds, the Wanderers' boss warned of the pitfalls in the risky business of speculating to secure a place in the Premiership.

Drawing on his own experience, which has forced him to adopt a prudent philosophy Chancellor Gordon Brown would be proud of, he gave Keegan and his City backers a reality check.

"Kevin wants more money but can Manchester City afford to take the gamble?" he queried. "If they do, then good luck to them. They know the consequences if it goes wrong. Our football club has already been through its nervous, almost administration stage three years ago and we don't want to go down that road again.

"It's not nice for me as a manager because you always want lots and lots of money to spend on players but there you go.

"I always felt, given the situation the football club was in, that it was always going to be that way. Strangely enough, when agents ring me now they offer me loan players first because they know the situation. And that's great because to go beyond that, it would have to be a massive, massive bargain for us to consider borrowing money to finance a transfer."

Allardyce looked on enviously in the summer as Keegan committed City to £30 million-worth of new recruits - Nicolas Anelka's fee alone was £12m - and spoke of pitching for a top six finish in his first season back in the Premiership. Over at the Reebok, debts of more than £30m meant the manager having to follow the now familiar route of loans and short-term deals as he set out with more modest ambitions - securing a third successive season in the top flight.

Now, whatever the truth and whatever the figures involved, Keegan is understood to have asked chairman David Bernstein for more - much more - to spend when the transfer window opens in January, just to improve City's chances of staying up.

Big Sam is no less determined to keep Wanderers in the Premiership but he knows the score.

Forget the big cheques; if his directors give him the wherewithal to borrow a couple of players who can do the sort of jobs Youri Djorkaeff and Fredi Bobic did last season, he will be satisfied.

"My job is to ask for two players, minimum," he confirmed. "Theirs is to try and get the funds to do it. If they can, that will be great; if not, we soldier on with what we've got."

Allardyce, whose total spending on transfer fees in just over three years at the Reebok is less than the £3.5 million Wanderers paid for Dean Holdsworth five years ago, has done what he can to generate as much cash as possible to fund loan deals for a couple more continental imports. Bo Hansen, Ryan Baldacchino and Alan O'Hare have left the club since the summer while Cleveland Taylor, Nicky Southall, David Norris, Steve Banks, Delroy Facey and now Holdsworth himself have all been loaned out at one stage or another.

"It's created a biggish saving," he explains. "We're trying to put a package together for at least two players - one in the defensive area, one in the attacking area - and we'll stick to that unless there's an injury crisis anywhere else in the team when January comes around.

"We used 33 players last season so, if we have a squad of 24 which we have this year - 26 including the goalkeepers - you just know it's not going to be big enough.

"It doesn't matter what position we are in the league, we need them. We needed them last year and we need them this year. We'll always need them, we can't go the whole of one season at any level of football without bringing a player in."