Boss Mick McCarthy says this season’s Championship is shaping up to be just as close as last year’s. The Blues are currently in 13th, an equal distance from the play-offs and the relegation zone.
"What are we, six points off the top six and six off the bottom three?” he said. "Here we go again, same as last season. It’s very, very tight, concertinaed up.
"Every point is a prisoner, so sometimes you have to walk away and say ‘You know what, we didn’t play as well as we can, the opposition played well, but we didn’t get beaten’. There’s a lot to be said for that.”
That was how he felt about last week’s 1-1 home draw with Barnsley: "Friday’s night’s game was a proper Championship game which we edged in the first half, it was a scrap.
"In the second half, they had a chance, Dean made a great save, they got a corner and they took the initiative in the game.
"They got a bit of momentum in the game and I think we found it hard to wrest that momentum from them, to be honest.
"And then we conceded a goal which I don’t think we should have. They played well, it’s always easy to say that it’s us that hadn’t played well, how about complimenting the opposition sometimes for how they played.
"I thought they took the game to us and penned us in. There’s not a lot between any of us in the league.”
McCarthy says he had no problem with the way some supporters reacted to the result: "I thought the fans were great. I had no problem with the boos at the end. We drew at home, I felt like we’d lost on Friday night, Saturday.
"That’s the problem, it gets built up that you’re going to win, they’ve lost every game away from home. It’s not going to happen all the season long.
"If I’d have been in their dressing room I’d have been saying ‘It can’t continue, we’ve been playing OK, we’re bound to get something’.
That’s just what happened. And I don’t think Barnsley are a bad team and I think they’ve got a decent squad of players.”
Despite not having been overly impressed with his side’s displays in the last two games, he feels they've done well enough for the most part but ought to be further up the table: "We’ve done OK, I think we should be better and we could have been better.”