Blues legend Mick Mills believes that Town would have struggled to hold on to their Championship status had they left it any longer before changing managers. Mick McCarthy took over on November 1st after Town had slumped to the bottom of the table on seven points under Paul Jewell, who had left by mutual consent the previous month.
Mills says that having avoided the drop, the club now has the chance to push on: "We have an opportunity to bounce forward.
"We’ve had that difficult spell under Paul Jewell where everything was going wrong and I think if it had been left any longer then we would have been in serious, serious trouble, especially how the league ended up with an amazing amount of points needed to stay in the division.
"Credit to Mick, he got off to a good start and all the way through when people were saying ‘You’ve only drawn the game, are you disappointed you haven’t won?’ he said that he’d take a point a game, and he was saying this from a long time out.
"And it actually proved to be the right thing, all you did need to do was to keep going. He kept them going and the one thing he did was organise things at the back, and that was vital.
"He sorted out the back four and they all of a sudden became a hard team to beat. They learnt how to defend and teams that were going to beat us were going to have to work hard for it.
"No more 5-0s and 6-0s, it was a great performance from the back players, everyone else responded in their own way. I think he did exceptionally well and I just hope we can move forward. We’ve given ourselves a chance to move forward.”
The former England skipper says relegation would have been a disaster: "I don’t agree with the argument that sometimes it does you good to go down because you can come back stronger.
"Sometimes people go down again, and who wants that? I was dreading this club going into League One. They’ve survived that scare and who knows what Mick can do next year.”
Last week McCarthy confirmed that Andy Drury, Arran Lee-Barrett and Lee Martin would be moving on, while Michael Chopra and Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, who have a year left on their Town contracts, have been told they are free to find new clubs.
Mills says he had high hopes for some of those players at the start of the season: "He’s got to make decisions and each one is different.
"Football is so unpredictable because there’s one amongst that group who I thought was going to be one of our most effective players this season and that was Andy Drury.
"I thought when he came back from Crawley last year he came back into the team and I thought he played really well and I thought that he might come on to really good things.
"And actually, I have to say regarding Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, I expected after what he did at the back end of last season that he was going to come on to become a very key player.
"And the third one, Lee Martin, I thought at the end of last season when he came in and played in a more central position, he looked good. But all three of those have slightly disappointed.
"It’s an up and down thing football and when you get to the end of season you have to make some very difficult decisions. Mick has made them and you have to go with it. There might be one or two that are wrong but he’s got to do it.”
Meanwhile, there is expected to be news of Town’s new kits later this week. The Blues will be replacing both strips again this summer with rumour suggesting the home kit will be a return to the historic white sleeves and the away strip red and black. Next season is the final year of current kit suppliers Mitre’s contract.