Town manager Mick McCarthy hailed the team spirit at Portman Road after his side came from a goal down to beat Bolton 2-1 at the Reebok Stadium. The 53-year-old, who was appointed a month ago on Saturday and has led the Blues to four wins since then, admitted that all was not entirely harmonious when he took over at the club.
McCarthy said: "There is a good spirit. I think there was a bit of bitching, a bit of back-biting when I went in, pointing fingers. It was everybody’s fault, not theirs individually because if you’re conceding goals it’s always the defenders and the keeper.
"What about the strikers who should hold it up and the midfielders who should pass it to somebody in a blue shirt? It’s a collective thing. It’s never just one thing.
"I think they’ve bought into that now and there’s none of that finger pointing. We’ve got shot of that. That happens, by the way, that’s nothing to do with Paul Jewell before me, that just happens when a team starts to get beaten.
"You can be the best psychologist in the world and you’re not going to change that until you change the results. The results get the team spirit.”
The win at the Reebok took the Blues to fifth from bottom, five points from the relegation zone having picked up 13 points out of a possible 21 since McCarthy was formally announced as boss on November 1st.
Asked whether he could have wished for better than that in his first month in charge, McCarthy said: "I could have hoped for maximum points!
"It’s funny when you come in and everybody says, ‘What do you hope for? What’s your first month going to get you?’.
"I tell you what, win the first game, that’s all you can do because if you start looking beyond, it just gets daft.
"It’s like if you concentrate on the result, your performance goes. Concentrate on the next game. I know it’s really old clichéd stuff, but if you’re worrying about the end result at the end of the season, you’ll stop playing here. And you have to play here to get the first result, and that’s what we did.
"We’ve just got to keep doing it, because, whilst we’re out of the bottom three and looking down on it, we ain’t safe. We’ve got to keep playing.
"We were crap in the first half, let me just clear that up, so we can’t let that happen, we’ve got to play like we did in the second half.”