Mick McCarthy says the criticism in the wake of last week’s defeat to local rivals Norwich City in the East Anglian derby was to be expected but that he is remaining as level-headed as ever.
"It was always going to be that way and I fully understand that,” he said. "That was always going to happen, it happens even more so when it’s a big derby game and it’s even more important.
"There’ll be a knee-jerk reaction from everybody. But you’ve known me now for nearly two years and there haven’t been too many knee-jerk reactions from me, whether it’s been a great result or a bad result.
"The consistency that I’ve shown runs through the club. We’re neither high as kites or as low as a snake’s belly. We’re somewhere in between all the time.”
He added: "I get upset about a lot of things, I get angry about a lot of things but I’m fairly quick to calm down and be reasonable, rational and back to my normal self.
"The game excites me still, frustrates me, angers me, gives me great joy. All those emotions.
"The disparity between winning and losing on a Saturday afternoon - when you’ve won you just feel a really nice pleasant feeling, when you’ve lost it’s horrible.
"But you’ve got to get on with it and we came in on Monday morning and we got on with it. It’s four games played, it’s not the end of the world.”
He says individual errors have cost his team in their last three matches: "You can’t work on stopping mistakes and that’s what they’ve been. When I say it’s not the end of the world don’t take that as meaning I don’t care because I do.
"But you can’t treat winning a game like it’s the best thing in the world and when you’ve lost that it’s the end of the world because you just have no constant in your life then, so we have to try and keep a level head about it.”
Looking back on the first four league matches he believes his team has done OK for the most part: "In the games we’ve actually played all right. On Saturday against Norwich it was just a bonkers goal which has cost us.
"The game was going nowhere and we conceded a type of goal which is very unlike us. I’ve seen it again and it was offside.
"But even then, as I said to the players today, so what if it is offside? I always say put it in the net and let the officials make the decision.
"And they didn’t give us the decision, they didn’t give offside, but it still doesn’t change the fact that we made a mistake and we could have stopped it and wouldn’t have had to rely on the official because they don’t get everything right.
"That was disappointing and all the goals, bar the deflection [for Fulham’s goal] which we couldn’t have done anything about, the others were avoidable and could have been stopped.”