Blues boss Mick McCarthy warns that although Saturday's opponents Peterborough may be bottom of the Championship there hasn’t been much in their recent games against high ranked opposition.
McCarthy has watched Posh in action and says those matches have been close: "The games I’ve seen, Blackburn I’ve had a look at this morning and the other game was Crystal Palace and there hasn’t been a great deal in them, strangely enough.
"The league’s like that. Then they concede a goal. Getting beaten 4-1 by Blackburn looks dreadful and yet for a lot of the game they were in it and were doing OK.
"Similarly in the Crystal Palace game, they were winning in that up until the last eight minutes. Like all the teams in the league they’ve got players who can compete in it and they’re not complete mugs, then someone makes a mistake and they get [punished].
"We’re not complete mugs but we give a goal away [like at Leicester] but have had two good performances and results.
"Peterborough are the same. On their day, they could turn up, they could play football and they can give you problems, but like us they make mistakes and it costs them.”
Town’s goal difference is an astonishing -25, while Peterborough’s is the second worst in the division at -10, and conceding goals is something which McCarthy says both managers will want to rectify quickly: "I guess that both sides have been looking to keep it tight all season but haven’t managed it. Every team that turns up wants to keep it tight, that’s a prerequisite.
"But what you tend to do with better players and with better defenders, teams who have not let goals in and who are organised, they keep it tight. That’s what happens.
"But we’ve done it in two of the games. In two games we’ve looked all right and we’ve looked solid. It wasn’t pretty but we looked solid.
"Then in two games against two of the better teams in the league when we’ve opened up and conceded, they’ve picked us off and we’ve looked wide open and not particularly good.
"I bet Darren Ferguson, if he was sat here, would say exactly the same thing about his team — in some games they’ve been all right, in others they’ve been wide open. It could be a 0-0 draw or a five-all draw after that spiel!”
Regarding last week’s 6-0 hammering at Leicester, McCarthy says he’d hoped he’d already seen the last result of that type: "I was determined after the Crystal Palace game that it didn’t happen again, but it did. Just being determined and me saying it doesn’t make it happen.
"It’s players on the pitch, when all’s said and done. We gave a stupid penalty away between the back four and Hendo coming out. I don’t think he should have been anywhere near it. He shouldn’t have been encouraged to come for it, it should have been cleared before that, on a couple of occasions.
"So, that was the first thing. There were a couple of mistakes, it was compounded by the penalty and then we’re chasing it. We are brittle at the moment, I keep saying that.
"When we’ve had something to defend, we’ve been solid, like we were in the Birmingham and Burnley games. We’ve been far better. When we’ve given something away like we did at Palace and Leicester, that’s caused us problems.”
He says that that’s how it is when a side is struggling: "It does happen. You can go out feeling great, then you can concede one and you become a bit fragile around the place, people don’t want the ball and it’s not quite what it is.
"A team that’s playing well, like Leicester, they get that break from the penalty, then score another one and suddenly they’re flying. The gulf in the teams becomes more evident then.”