Mick McCarthy says he’s confident that his current squad is good enough to pick up enough points to stay in the Championship. However, he hopes he can make improvements in January.
McCarthy said: "I feel my Ipswich team has got enough in them to pick up points here, there and everywhere, and enough to stay in the league. We’ll get to January and we’ll make sure it’s a better Ipswich team.
"But for the meantime, I think we’ve got enough to keep us ticking along and keep getting points and making sure that we’re competitive at the level we’re at. And that level is in the bottom half of the table.
"That doesn’t just change overnight. I said when I came in that we might win one, lose one, we might be out of the three, in the bottom three, the important thing is [where we are on] May 4th.”
He says they need to emulate their performances against Burnley and Birmingham during today’s game against Peterborough: "We were hard to beat against Burnley, that’s what we were. I can’t remember Hendo diving and making too many saves and similarly against Birmingham, a game that we won.
"We talked about being hard to beat last week but we were anything but because we conceded after six minutes.
"We need to get back to that. Pretty’s winning. Pretty is winning football matches. I didn’t hear anybody complaining as we went off against Burnley. I seem to remember that the 16,500, those that were our fans, were all cheering and saying particularly nice things about us.”
McCarthy says the Leicester game has been firmly put behind them, even if he was less than happy at the time: "Monday morning it was gone, finished, no point harping on about it, it was a bad result. We’ve had two good ‘uns and two bad ‘uns. We can only do something about this game now.
"I wasn’t frustrated at all, I was bloody angry and downright disappointed. Whatever adjectives you want to put on it, frustrated wasn’t one.
"We looked at the game on Monday morning, we do, the players looked at different things from the game and, yes, we’ve addressed them.
"We thought we’d addressed them after Crystal Palace but it happened again, it was even worse. But that’s done, finished. [We need to] beat Peterborough, that’s what we’ve got to do. Let’s discuss that rather than the nonsense that went on last week.”
In terms of the squad, he admits the loan situation — he has six domestic loanees only five of whom can be named in a matchday squad and two from overseas — isn’t ideal but he has to work with what he was left by the previous manager and with the transfer window shut has been limited in terms of adding to his squad.
"It makes life difficult, but that’s what I inherited,” he admitted. "Two have gone back, of course, Massimo Luongo and Richie Wellens and we’ve just replaced them [with Bradley Orr from Blackburn and Tyrone Barnett from Peterborough, who is unavailable today].
"That’s the position we’re in. We’ve got a lot of loan players — we’ve got to deal with it. I can’t do anything else, I couldn’t sign anybody, so we’ll wait and see until January before we start doing anything with that.”
He had wanted Richie Wellens to return but Leicester weren’t keen on letting the midfielder out for a second spell. Would he look at the 32-year-old again in January?
"Let’s deal with Saturday,” he said. "New year? We’ve got nine games before then, let’s deal with that.”