Boss Mick McCarthy says he’s spent the last couple of days wondering if he could have done anything differently during Town’s 4-4 draw at Derby on Tuesday. The Rams staged a remarkable second half comeback to draw having been 4-1 down at half-time.
"I can’t affect the result, "McCarthy said. "What would anybody want me to do? I’m racking my brains about what I could have done and what I should have done.
"I haven’t been 4-1 up too often to find out. I wonder what I’ll do if we are again, come in and change it?
"I doubt that. Imagine me saying ‘You two are coming off because you’ve been playing so well I’m going to change it’.
"Should I, at 4-1 up at half-time, have made some changes, took a couple off and put some fresh legs on? Or should I have gone 4-5-1 and decided we’ll hang on to what we’ve got? Or go 4-3-3 and make us hard to beat.
"Had I done that and we’d conceded three goals I’d never have lived with myself because that would have been a negative approach, and it didn’t warrant that.
"It was just the fact that they scored a goal completely out of the blue after 90 seconds and it changed the dynamic of the game and the momentum went with them. Suddenly, they looked like us, it looked like we swapped shirts.”
He says there’s no point about crying about it now: "That is reality and there’s nothing I can do about it, there’s no point in me saying ‘We should have had three points’, hanging my head, beating myself up and beating the players up. Why? They’ve been brilliant, they’ve been fantastic.
"If we’d have come back from 4-1 we’d all have been feeling fabulous but I would have been looking at the first half and saying ‘How did we let those four in? Are you for real, you can’t play like that? We’ve got away with murder, we’ve got a four-all draw!’. I accept the things I can’t change.”
Prior to McCarthy’s pre-match press conference yesterday afternoon, the Town squad were undergoing cryotherapy in a portable facility parked in the Playford Road car park, which sees them enter a chamber at temperatures down to -130°C for around two minutes while wearing nothing other than shorts, protection against frostbite on their knees and elbows, gloves, goggles and a hat.
The process removes lactic acid and prevents muscle damage, thereby aiding recovery. McCarthy says the squad first used it in the summer and were impressed: "They go in there at some bonkers temperature - you wouldn’t want to lean against the wall!
"It aids recovery, the ice chamber. To be fair, they had it in pre-season and they did some runs and they’d been in it before and they said it was the best they’d felt doing that run and the times were great.
"It’s scientifically proven but you know what’s even better when it’s proven when they actually do something and they actually believe that it works. We’ve had a lot of games.”