Norwood: It's Still Early Days, We're Staying Level-Headed
Friday, 20th Sep 2019 13:37

Top scorer James Norwood says there’s a buzz around the club at present, with the Blues second in the table a point behind leaders Coventry with a game in hand and still unbeaten, but says everyone’s remaining level-headed.

“It’s good,” Norwood said when asked about the buzz currently around Town. “We’re obviously level-headed, it’s still early days. We’ve got a plan that we’re trying to stick to and we’re on course to do that.”

Town are now unbeaten in nine games going back to the final game of last season - their longest run since an 11-game streak during November and December 2014 - and Norwood believes that can have a psychological impact on opposition sides.

“The longer you go unbeaten, the harder you are to beat, I think,” he said. “If we get to 10 or 11 games unbeaten, people are going to come to Portman Road and say ‘They haven’t lost here, they haven’t lost away, how do you beat Ipswich?’.

"And I think that’s going to be important for us, we need that fear factor.”

But he says no one in the dressing room is starting to think of going unbeaten for the entire season or anything like that.

“No, we just focus on the next game, we’ve broken our season up into blocks, I won’t tell you about it, but we’ve broken our season up into a certain number of blocks and focused on those as small goals and then next one is the main aim,” he added.

“We’re going into Gillingham tomorrow and we’re looking to win the game. That’s as far as we’re thinking ahead.

“We’ll come in Sunday and cool down and go through it Monday and Tuesday and look ahead to Saturday with Tranmere and look to win that one as well. We’re not looking any further than six days ahead at any one time.”

He says visiting teams will also raise their game given the size of the club in League One: “I think if you look at Portman Road it’s one of the biggest stadiums in the league with one of the biggest teams, if not the biggest.

“Any football player wants to play at the biggest team in the division and go to the division above and we’ve got a massive chance of doing that and I think people are going to give 10 to 15 per cent extra because they want to come to a club like Ipswich.

"It’s up to us to raise our levels above then and we’ve been doing that this season.”

Photo: TWTD

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