Boss Mick McCarthy was delighted to see Jay Tabb score his second goal of the season in Tuesday’s 1-0 home victory over Bolton but admits that his midfielders need to net more regularly.
Tabb is the only Town player to have scored more than once from midfield this season with Luke Hyam, Teddy Bishop, Kevin Bru, Paul Anderson and Darren Ambrose each having found the net once and Jonny Parr having grabbed one of his two for the season while on as a sub in midfield at Millwall.
Cole Skuse, who hit the post against the Trotters, Stephen Hunt and Richard Chaplow are amongst the midfielder still to open their accounts for the Blues.
"I’ve been saying all season that we should get more goals from midfield and they certainly don’t disagree with that,” McCarthy said. "They try to get them.
"There are some midfielders that get them, there are others [that don’t]. I look at Derby and I think about their midfield last year and the goals they got.
"They’ve got one striker, they’ve got midfield players who can run from there and they can get forward a bit more.
"We’re playing 4-4-2, but they still should score more goals and it was great to see Tabby getting his goal.
"He’d been put on his backside twice just before. He challenged for two headers, he flicked one of them on and the guy put him on his face.
"But he got up, wasn’t whinging at the ref and, like I said on Tuesday, it was a pure strike! He shanked it into the bottom corner. But, who cares? It was the winner.”
He says winning the game was more important than the performance: "That’s always the case. If we’ve lost, you’ve got to analyse it and look for the positives in it and if we’ve played well, I’ll say we’ve played well.
"If we’ve been hopeless I’m the first one to say it as well. It’s always about results, it’s always about getting points.”
McCarthy moved to 4-3-3 against Bolton and says he could use the system again, having made the half-time switch in part to negate the threat posed by Bolton midfielder Rochinha but also to add to Town’s attacking threat.
"It was a bit of both because suddenly they’ve got three centre-backs who have got to play against three strikers and you can force them to put their wing-backs back,” he said.
"And I had to take care of Rochinha and we did. It stopped the supply to him and, whilst we weren’t completely dominant in the second half, I thought we were the better team.
"They didn’t really have anything in the second half, not like they did in the first. It depends, it’s a consideration [for the future].”
He remembers the system working well earlier in the season, most notably at Wigan: "That was one of the best performances that we’ve had. Of course, they changed their formation before the game, they didn’t play the way we were thinking they would but it suited us anyway, thankfully.”
Despite his lack of goals McCarthy has been pleased with Skuse, who he thought was one of Town’s best performers on Tuesday.
"I think Skusey’s been outstanding all season,” he added. "He allows the others to play and he mops up after other people’s errors, he’s just terrific.
"His was a really excellent performance on Tuesday in a really mediocre game, I might add.
"It was good [to watch] because it was wide open and there were lots of chances, but I reckon we both had about 20 per cent of the ball and for 60 per cent it was in the ether or in the air or out or between us both and nobody had it. Not great quality but the three points were.”