Boss Mick McCarthy was delighted with the manner in which Town finally sealed their place in the Championship for 2013/14 by beating Birmingham 3-1 at Portman Road. Carlos Edwards, Luke Chambers and Daryl Murphy netted the goals which took the Blues to 60 points and 11th in the table.
McCarthy says he was happy to have Town’s divisional status confirmed at last: "I’m delighted, really pleased, and the way we managed to seal it the way we did as well.
"We’re not relying on anybody else, it was a really good performance, it couldn’t have been better really. It was a good victory.”
The Blues boss says Town played as well as they have this season: "I think it’s as good as we’ve played and there was still a little bit of pressure on us.
"I didn’t want to get into the situation where if we got beaten and others won, we’d go to Burnley needing something. I’d have hated that.
"I just thought we played with a bit of freedom. And we should have had a penalty. It was a stonewall penalty when Zigic handled it.
"We didn’t get it, then the keeper makes a great save [from Daryl Murphy] at a corner and it looks like it’s going to be one of those days and then Carlos came up with a complete bomb. I don’t know where that came from. Well, I do, he had one at Derby. Terrific.”
The only negative was allowing Chris Burke to net late on for the visitors: "I’m not happy that we didn’t get a clean sheet because we should have done and that’s the kind of stuff that gets you into trouble; letting teams off the hook. That disappoints me, but overall [I’m delighted].
"If someone had said to me in October when I was asked we’d need 60 points to stay up and we’d got seven, I’d have said ‘Do me a favour, forget it, I’m not going anywhere near it’. The league’s just remarkable.”
McCarthy says he’s sorry to see former club Wolves on the verge of crashing into League One: "I had such a good time there. I loved my time there and that was cut short, I thought, we all know the reasons why.
"But, it’s like this place, there are a lot of people who have worked here for years and there are families that work in the club and they’re such lovely, lovely people.
"I went to see every one of them when I left, I knew them all and I feel desperately sorry for a lot of good people because there’ll be major changes if they do get relegated, and they shouldn’t be anywhere near it, not a chance, not with the players they’ve got.”
Would they be in the same sort of trouble had he been manager at Molineux? "Not a chance. Nowhere near it. Absolutely not. They would have been at least in the play-offs.”
Birmingham boss Lee Clark thought his side didn’t help themselves: "I was really frustrated because we contributed to our own downfall by conceding such crazy goals.
"Carlos Edwards’s strike was an unstoppable strike but we gave the ball away so cheaply. Then for the second it was a free header.
"Our decision-making in the first half was very poor. I thought those kind of mistakes had been banished to the past.”