Town boss Mick McCarthy admitted that his team didn’t play well enough to claim all three points from their 0-0 draw at home to Wigan.
"I’m delighted with a point from the game,” he said. "It was a horrible game, neither side played particularly well.
"I think it’s a good point. I’ve just stressed to the lads - whatever it takes. If it takes 75 points to get in the play-offs, we only need another 24 for that. And whatever it takes to win it, we’ve one more to that total.
"I look around and I think Brentford would have been delighted with a point and others would. I’m pleased with a point because we didn’t do well enough to win it.”
He says teams need to grind out points from such scruffy games in order to be successful at any level: "Unless you’re Arsenal or Manchester United or Manchester City or one of the top teams, I think it’s the key to getting results in any division. We’ve not played well.
"I put their team up on the board and I thought Fortune, McClean, Waghorn, Kvist, Huws, I went through their team and I said to the lads, ‘Can anybody tell me that that’s a bottom six team? A bottom three team?’.
"Not in a million years, that team ought to be challenging where we are. They’ve got a new manager in, Malky, and they’ve got potential in that side now. They made it hard for us, really difficult.”
He added: "I’m not one for making excuses. We haven’t played well for whatever reasons. I don’t think the conditions were particularly good. The pitch didn’t hold up well under those conditions.
"It was blowing a gale, it was freezing. I’m not so sure any of us who took part in it were particularly good today.
"But if that was me and I’d come away to a team who were third or fourth at the start of the game and I was Malky, I’d be thinking it was a magnificent performance and that they’d done really well and I would be so proud of my team for having stopped a team who were in the top three or four.”
He says almost every team has a tough patch during even the most successful of seasons: "We all do, maybe the best teams in the league won’t.
"Middlesbrough have had a great result, Bournemouth have, Derby have, arguably the best teams in the league, the three of them.
"Wolves have had bad times, Brentford did and then they’d won 10 out of 13 up until today. We’re not that good that we’re going to win every game.
"And I think we were playing against a good Championship team, a good squad of players. It wasn’t our day, we’ve not played well, we’ve not played well enough to win, so I’ll take the point.”
He admitted that striker Daryl Murphy was missed, but says that was inevitable: "Whoever has got a got a goalscorer who has scored 18 goals wouldn’t they miss him if he wasn’t playing?
"Would you prefer to have him? I would, and that’s not being derogatory to the lads. Didz has come back after being out for two weeks and Hunty’s not really played that much, he’s only had two or three games in the last how ever many months.
"I think anyone would miss Murph’s prowess as a player and his goalscoring ability and his aerial ability. He’ll be all right for Saturday, I hope.”
McCarthy was pleased to see Freddie Sears again make an impact from the bench and felt he might have made more of one of his opportunities but for an incorrect flag.
"He got across the defender on the half-chance," he continued. "And he might have done something better when he was given offside when it was their midfielder passed the ball to him, but hey ho.”
Wigan boss Malky Mackay was delighted with the point even if the game wasn’t pretty on the eye: "It doesn’t really matter to me what the neutral might think, it’s what I think of my team’s performance here today, which I thought was terrific.
"We were coming to a team at the very the top of the league, who grind teams down. I’ve watched four games here as a neutral and Ipswich come and do that, they grind you down and then eventually they score and take the three points and they move on.
"That’s why they’re top of the league. It’s a firm formula in this league in order to be at the top and they tick a lot of boxes for that, so we had to make sure we matched that today and did that and I think to a man we did.
"I don’t think anybody looks at that game and is able to tell me who is top and who is bottom. I thought there was very little between the two teams and that we gave a very good account of ourselves. That being the case, it’s something to kick on from.”