Boss Mick McCarthy believes he and his assistant Terry Connor have established a platform upon which they can build in their year at Portman Road. The duo took control a year ago today and steered the doomed-looking Blues away from relegation last season.
McCarthy says that that was no easy task: "We’ve achieved something because we stayed in the league. I don’t think you guys who were here on November 1st last year thought that that was going to happen.
"But we haven’t really won anything and I think we have got a good base, a good platform on which to build.
"We’ve got a solid group of lads who all enjoy playing for the club. They give everything for the club, there’s a good spirit and a good camaraderie. I think there is a good platform for us to build upon.
"If we get Tayls back and he’s fitter, we might get some goals there, who knows. It’s settled, there’s stability in the place.
"I guess [staying up last season has given the] players a bit of belief in me and TC and it gives fans a bit of belief and me and TC. It just settled it down, that’s all it did. It’s just given a nice, solid base on which to build.”
He says looking at last season’s league table now makes it appear that Town, who finished 14th, were more comfortable than they actually were during the final weeks: "We had two games left and we were still worried. With about 57 points we could still have gone down.
"When you see the league it looks like we stayed up easily. But it was right to the very last knockings. I was proud of the players rather than anything else, I don’t sit there feeling pride for myself.
"I thought the way the players went about it from the Birmingham game [his first in charge] was great. I’d just watched the two games prior to that, Derby and Sheffield Wednesday, and we’d been slapped completely.
"It looked pretty unlikely that we were going to go to Birmingham and win, but we did and the players deserved the pat on the back because they were great.”
Any hesitation in taking the job? "Not half! But I wanted to get back to work. I was coming to a good club and I know the Championship. It’s far from easy by any stretch of the imagination for anybody.
"The fact that the average tenure for every manager for is about 15 months tells you it’s not easy. But I just had a feeling that we would stay up.
"I actually thought 50 points would do it. Had someone told me it was going to be 60, I might have swerved it!”
Overall, McCarthy, who is now the 46th longest-serving league manager, says he’s enjoyed his 12 months in Suffolk: "I’ve loved it, every bit of it. It’s been great. It was a bit of mixed bag to start with. We went to Birmingham and won and then lost at Crystal Palace by five.
"Then we beat Burnley and then we lost by six at Leicester. It was a bit topsy-turvy, but I think it was always going to be that way because of where we were in the league and everything that had gone on at the club.
"But it seems settled now, it seems a settled camp. People are enjoying coming in and training.”
How far can Town go this season? He’s not sure: "I don’t know. The performances that we’ve put in have been as good as any of them, against Burnley, against QPR, Reading. But we didn’t win the games.
"So, you can talk about playing well, but you’ve got to win them. If we can continue to play like that with the squad that we have and we don’t get injuries and suspensions, I don’t know what we’ll achieve, but we’ll be OK. We’ll be hard team to beat anyway.
"I look at Burnley playing against us and arguably we were the better team and had the better chances, but they had Johnny-on-the-spot on the day. That’ll turn for us.
"We’ve had a few deflections go against us for goals, Birmingham and Reading are the two which stick out.
"Reading, there was a murder going on there for a while, then they get a deflection and it changes it all. We’ll get those at some stage. We’ll get the decision or the bit of good fortune and we might nick a couple of points somewhere when we haven’t played well.”
But he’s confident that Town are moving in the right direction, even if he believes they should be further up the table than their current 14th place: "I’d would have always been hopeful for more but I would probably have taken it from where we were last season.
"On November 1st this year we’ve made progress compared to what I inherited. But I’m not happy with it, I think we should be better off.”