Boss Paul Jewell has revealed that he was seriously concerned that Town might be relegated after the 2-1 loss at Millwall in his first game in charge. Since then, despite Saturday’s defeat to Portsmouth, the Blues manager says he’s pleased with the progress made, but says there’s still much work to be done.
Jewell says that while he was worried after the game at the Den, he similarly wasn’t getting carried away after Town’s hammering of Doncaster: "After my first game in charge at Millwall I thought, ‘Christ, it’s going to be all on to stay up here!’
"After the Doncaster game we won 6-0 I said that it was never a 6-0 game, it was a freak result. Even the Derby game which we won, I didn’t feel we played that great.
"But in the three games since then — Hull, QPR and Portsmouth — I feel we’ve been outstanding for a large part of them.
"If we play like we did against Portsmouth in every game between now and the end of the season we won’t lose too many.”
Town’s recent performances have been significantly better in the first half than in the second, which Jewell says is down to a couple of factors: "I think it’s two things. Once the opposition get a goal they have a spring in their step. You can’t dominate any game for 90-odd minutes.
"When they scored [on Saturday], it was a bad goal from our perspective defensively and they got a lift. I think they’ve had three shots on target in the whole game.
"They got a lift and it puts us on the back foot a bit. And that’s what I mean when I talk about mental strength. We need to move forward, instead of taking a backwards step, next year we want to take a forwards step and go toe to toe with them.
"But then we gave a goal away like the second one, which was a bit of a comedy cut. Once that happened we were a bit deflated.
"We had a couple of chances after that, for example when Tamás went through, although it wasn’t a penalty. Chances like that we’ve got to take. We didn’t even make the goalkeeper work.
"We’ve got to get the mental ruthlessness into us so that when things go against rather than taking a step back and feeling sorry for ourselves, we take a step forward. We’ll get that either from within the group or by getting players of that mentality to join us.”
The Blues boss says that although he is disappointed with the result, he was pleased with the performance: "When I wake up the first thing I’ll think of is that we lost 2-0. Then when I watch the DVD we’ll analyse it and we’ll see that we have played well, which we did, even their guys are saying that.
"There’s nothing worse when you’re having a drink with the opposition manager and he says ‘We were lucky today’.
"We passed it with a purpose, which was the thing that pleased me. We went up, back, through, we had good rotation in the middle of the park and they couldn’t get near us.
"Their goalie’s made a couple of saves and even when we beat him it hit one of our lads on the line. It’s horrible sitting here when you’ve lost 2-0 but if you look at the overall picture, anyone who has an ounce of football knowledge will know we were unlucky not to win, although I hate saying we’re unlucky because teams who are bottom of the table are always unlucky they say.
"I’m quite happy with a lot of the progress that’s been made here but also I’m aware that there’s loads of progress and loads of work ahead to make us into a tough team that’s hopefully going to be challenging for promotion next year.
"We’re not out of the woods yet this year, there’s a long way to go yet, but it doesn’t look like a relegation team to me. After the game at Millwall, I have to be brutally honest, I thought it was a team which had it all to do to stay up.”