KEITH Branagan shrugged off any hint of transfer talk today and endorsed Colin Todd's plan to strengthen Wanderers' squad for next season's Division One campaign.

"The boss has made it clear he wants to keep his squad together and is looking to add to it," the Burnden keeper acknowledged, "If the club is going in that direction and showing that kind of promise to go forward, it can only be good for all of us."

Todd is ready to spend big at home and abroad in the close season to strengthen his hand for a quick return to the Premier League.

He has already checked out Holland and has singled out specific targets in Denmark in his bid to bounce back after the bitter blow of relegation.

And Branagan, whose goalkeeping heroics won him the BEN-HB Electronics Player of the Season award and sparked end-of-season speculation that he was a transfer target of impressed Premier League clubs, believes the manager is building from a position of strength. "Going down was a bitter blow," he admitted. "It's not been very nice to go through it and it was especially frustrating knowing how long it took to get there and how much work went into moving the club forward and raising our profile.

"Suddenly it's all gone out of the window.

"Last season we built a squad to try to stay in the Premiership. Next season that squad could be good enough to lead the First Division all the way. And the manager is looking to add to it. That can only be good news."

Branagan, who narrowly missed out on the BEN-HB award in previous seasons, also draws encouragement from the recoveries shown by recently-relegated Leicester and Crystal Palace, who will contest the Division One play-off final on Monday. He believes Wanderers will be wiser as well as older when the new season gets under way.

Fully recovered from the knee injury that kept him out of seven of the last eight games of the campaign and currently recuperating from a recent operation to cure a groin problem that had caused him constant pain since the turn of the year, the Republic of Ireland B international reflected: "We've got to look on last season as part of the learning process.

"We've learned a lot, especially the players who had never played at that level before. I played at the top with Millwall but the quality up there is even better now. You get punished a lot more these days. Every club has two or three players capable of creating something out of nothing - Manchester United probably had 10.

"We really only had Sasa who was capable of breaking teams down and they quickly learned how to deal with him.

"But we learned as we went along and started to show that we were coming to terms with it in the latter part of the season." KEITH Branagan, who won ten individual BEN-HB "Star Man" awards out of 39 appearances, ended with a match mark average of 7.3 out of 10, edging out Gudni Bergsson, who was runner up with 7.19 from his 41 appearances (eight Star Man ratings). Sasa Curcic was third with an average 6.94 from 32 appearances, including six Star Man ratings.

The keeper receives a trophy and a family holiday from awards' sponsors HB Electronics.

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