Boss Paul Jewell says the Blues’ defensive woes haven’t been helped by regular changes of personnel with Town having fielded four keepers and 10 different centre-half partnerships this season. However, he believes a lack of confidence and psychological factors have also led to the Blues conceding more league goals than anyone else in the division, 51, and having a tendency to let leads slip, with 18 points having been dropped from winning positions.
Jewell says the central defensive situation has been more of an issue than goalkeepers: "We had Stocky at the start of the season before he was called back, so it’s not as if we’ve been chopping and changing goalkeepers every week.
"But other than Danny Collins and Sonko when we won that run of games, we haven’t had any [regular] centre-half pairing, and then Sonks got injured.
"There’s been chopping and changing because of injuries and suspensions. It’s been unfortunate and I think that’s added to the problems.”
The Blues manager says mental issues are perhaps more significant: "I think confidence-wise and psychologically we’ve suffered - as soon as that board goes up you can almost see the trepidation in the players’ faces because we’ve been done so often [late on].
"We’ve just got to get over that hurdle, we’ve got to be strong men, have a stronger mentality. Sometimes we seem to turn a corner. We got a clean sheet against Derby, we were looking decent against Leicester, and again we gave away a daft penalty and it cost us three points.
"Little things. Just when we’ve been making progress we’ve had the rug pulled from under us, and most of it has been down to ourselves, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot.”