Town’s 21-goal Championship top scorer Daryl Murphy has revealed that he’ll be taking to the field wearing a mask to protect his broken nose when Reading are the visitors to Portman Road on Saturday.
The 31-year-old clashed heads with former Blues loanee Ryan Tunnicliffe as he nodded home Jay Tabb’s corner in the fifth minute at Craven Cottage and spent a lengthy spell off the pitch while the club's medican staff stopped his nose from bleeding and clicked it back into place.
Speaking in an interview with WLR FM back in his home town of Waterford, the striker confirmed that he’ll be OK to face the Royals.
"I’ll be fine for the Reading match, I think they’re looking at getting a mask made for me, so you might notice me on the pitch on Saturday!”
Murphy, named in this week's Football League Team of the Week, is the first Town striker to net 20 league goals in a season since David Johnson scored 22 in 1999/00 with no one having reached the milestone as quickly since Ray Crawford and Ted Phillips.
The Ireland international says it’s "an honour” to find himself in such illustrious company, but doesn’t expect to beat Phillips’s 1956/57 club record goals total.
"I think I’ve got a long way to go to beat Ted Phillips’s 41 in a season!” he added. "I think that might be just out of reach. But just to be in amongst those names is absolutely brilliant.”
But even if 41 might be too much of an ask, Murphy says he’s determined to get as many as possible during the remaining 15 games of the campaign.
"There’s no point in stopping now,” he said. "I might as well keep going and see how many I can reach and climb up the table a bit.”
Meanwhile, former Blue Jack Doherty, 20, has rejoined his former club Waterford United after spending the second half of the last Irish season at Limerick, following his release by the Blues.
You can hear the full interview with Daryl Murphy here.