BEN Doak remains happy at Middlesbrough and is unaffected by the speculation surrounding his future, says Michael Carrick, who remains hopeful the Liverpool winger will stay at the Riverside for the rest of the season.

Doak's future was plunged into uncertainty last week when Crystal Palace and Ipswich made permanent bids for the winger, which were rejected by Liverpool.

Both clubs are still said to be keen on the teenager and weighing up their next move, while Brentford and Fulham have also been linked.

But Carrick remains "very calm" about the situation and says Doak isn't at all unsettled by developments in the last week. The Scotland international is understood to be loving his loan spell at Boro and Carrick believes the move is currently benefiting all parties.

Liverpool are understood to be thrilled with how the loan move has so far played out for Doak, who they value at £30m.

Whether any of the interested clubs are willing to pay that much for Doak this month remains to be seen, but the speculation hasn't had any impact on the winger.

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"He's absolutely fine, no problem, no difference," says Carrick.

"He just gets on with his work as he has from day one. It suits him here. It's a good place to be, he's enjoying his football, he's learning, developing, having a great experience.

"I've got nothing but positive things to say about Ben."

Asked whether Doak's preference would be to stay at Boro until the end of the season, Carrick said: "It's difficult for me to answer that. It certainly suits him in many ways.

"There's no denying some of it is out of our hands but I'm really calm and content. Hopefully it plays out and we're all happy and we still have Ben. We're in a good place and it's a good place for him."

Ipswich are set to sign Jaden Philogene from Aston Villa but are understood to remain interested in signing a right winger this month, while Palace are also pushing to sign Millwall's Romain Esse, Lions boss Alex Neil confirmed yesterday. It's not known at that stage whether that will have any impact on their pursuit of Doak.

Neil said: "There is interest from Crystal Palace. It has been well-documented. How far down the line that is, I’m not too quite sure.

“But I think people need to recognise how well we as a club have done by securing Romain on a new contract, which took, by all accounts, a lot of convincing to stay – because he wanted to play football. He is now playing football and has certainly been one of our best performers this season.

“We don’t want to lose our best players but everyone understands the contract situation surrounding Romain. If he does move he will move for significant money which from the club perspective has been brilliant business considering we could’ve lost him in the summer (next summer) for free.

“I don’t know when and if because I am not involved in that sort of negotiation side of things, but there certainly has been interest – as there will be if you have good players.”

Neil added: “The difficulty you have always got is that we, or certainly I, don’t get involved in speculation. It can be speculated that 10 different clubs are going to come in for Rom – all I do know is there has been significant interest from Crystal Palace. That is the only one I can comment on because interest and paper talk doesn’t really matter, that could be true or false.

“As far as I know right now, Crystal Palace are the main one.”