Boss Mick McCarthy admits he’s concerned by the prospect of Town being relegated but says he doesn’t spend his time worrying about it. Instead, he and assistant manager Terry Connor busy themselves working on ways of winning the points to prevent that from happening.
McCarthy said: "I don’t lose any sleep over it, but it concerns me. I don’t want to be relegated out of this league. I came here with the sole intention of keeping Ipswich Town in the league and that’s still my motivation and raison d’etre.
"I don’t want to change that and worrying about it’s not going to do me any good. We sit there, myself and Terry, and we look at the teams and how we can play, how we can stop them, what we can do.
"But, if you’re asking me whether on a daily basis I’m walking around worrying about it, no. We plan for the games and we do our best.”
He says it’s important not to get too over the top after a win or too downcast after a poor result: "I think it’s vital to keep an even demeanour and not to be up and down if you lose one or win one, and change what you do.
"Personalities can change if it starts getting to, as Sir Alex describes it, ‘squeaky bum time’. And of course it is for people going for promotion, people battling against relegation.
"We’ve seen it with promotion teams as much as anything, with Cardiff, with Leicester, having strange results from games you’d expect them to win. Brighton, they’ve tripped up a bit. Then other teams at the bottom are winning games.
"Just keep doing what you’ve done to get the results in the past because changing it isn’t going to help, I can assure you.”
Even if Town’s results have been more up and down than he would have wanted recently — the Blues haven’t won back to back games since the turn of the year — McCarthy says his team has regularly put in decent displays: "I’d like to think we’ve had consistent performances over recent weeks, even at Nottingham Forest. Against Leicester and Peterborough, we’ve played well in those games.
"If you’ve got some level of form and consistency in your performances, then you’ll get some results. If you play rubbish one week and great the next, that’s when it’s really inconsistent, but that’s not been the case, we’ve played all right.”
The bottom of the table remains tight — only four points separate 20th-placed Town from all three sides in the relegation positions — and McCarthy isn’t surprised that previously struggling teams are picking up points: "We’re all fighting for our livelihoods in this league. It’s a real scrap for survival.
"It must make you run a little bit harder. I’m not surprised because it happens every year, teams at the bottom winning games.”
The Town manager isn’t sure whether the usual survival total of around 50 will be enough to stay up this time around: "It may, it may not, depending on what games everybody’s got.
"I would have thought 52 points would be fine, although I know Millwall went down with 52 in 1996 [on the final day of the season at Portman Road], but I would have thought that would be fine. But I might be wrong.”