Stand-in skipper Liam Ridgewell believes striker Mauro Zarate will benefit from playing regular football for another season with Birmingham rather than joining one of the big guns this summer.

Blues boss Alex McLeish wants to keep Zarate - on loan from Al-Sadd - for at least another 12 months and acknowledges he will face competition for the services of the Argentinian at the end of the current campaign.

And Ridgewell feels the 21-year-old, who also attracted interest from Tottenham and Newcastle, would reap the rewards of playing regularly with City rather than being a fringe player at a leading club.

Zarate showed his quality when coming off the substitutes' bench to score a stunning free-kick equaliser in the 1-1 draw with Everton to take his goal tally to four in four games.

Ridgewell said: "I think we have got a couple of goal-of-the-season contenders, Sebastian Larsson's goal at Spurs could win it but for Mauro to come off the bench and score a goal like that was excellent.

"Coming off the bench he has been doing really well. He got his couple of starts against Reading and Manchester City and did really well.

"Hopefully he can keep banging in the goals towards the end of the season.

"Mauro is definitely doing everything possible to try and convince the club to keep him. He is showing what he can do. I hope he can stop here. He is a great player and we'd like to keep him.

"You can see when a great player is emerging. He has got a good touch and good skill and I am sure he will get even better.

"I think if he stays another year he would benefit from playing regular football. People like myself, and other people who have come to Birmingham, get better by doing that."

McLeish said: "Mauro gives us a different option. He is still learning the team game and, if he had gone to bigger clubs, you probably wouldn't see him for six months.

"I've got to be careful I am not throwing him in every week just for the sake of the individual skills he has got because I've two experienced strikers out there, two international players.

"But we knew we had a deadly weapon in Mauro to come off the bench. I said to him before the game that, though he would be disappointed not to be playing, he could still make an impact and he certainly did that."

Ridgewell, who wore the captain's armband in place of the suspended Damien Johnson, insisted Blues would continue to adopt a positive approach in their bid to remain in the top flight.

He said: "We saw that Bolton won to reduce the gap but we're only a point behind Reading and we've got to keep looking upwards. We are not looking behind us.

"We will go into the last four games trying to catch one of the teams above us.

"We will keep going until the last game of the season. We were losing 1-0 against one of the top sides in Everton and some teams might crumble.

"But you can see how positive we are and we managed to claw our way back into it."

Everton boss David Moyes admitted he would not have sold James McFadden to Birmingham in January for £6million had he been able to predict the injuries that would engulf his squad.

The Toffees clearly missed the presence of Tim Cahill, Mikel Arteta and Leon Osman at St Andrews and needed a ninth goal of the season from Joleon Lescott to earn a share of the spoils.

Moyes said: "It is four points from the last two games but I think it is obvious we are not firing on all cylinders and are missing players who are important to us.

"We are struggling a bit for our form but we've just got to keep moving on and picking up points. It is the injuries, not the long campaign, which are taking their toll.

"It is more to do with the three to four people we are missing. We are very limited in what we have available in forward areas and in midfield we are nearly drained of resources.

"You can have as many players as you like but you always need your best players in the team and we are missing too many of them at the moment.

"If we had known, we probably wouldn't have let James McFadden go in January. He is a good player. He was a good player at Everton. He will do well for Birmingham."

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