Town boss Mick McCarthy felt the Blues’ 1-1 home draw with AFC Bournemouth was a fair enough result, even if he was disappointed to concede the equaliser in the 82nd minute. Freddie Sears put Town ahead on six but debutant Kenwyne Jones nodded home for the Cherries with his first touch for his loan club.
"I can’t sit here in all honesty and say 1-1’s not a fair result because they had a lot of the game,” McCarthy said.
"But, that said, of course I’m disappointed at conceding when we did, but it was a hard game and we’ve had to play well and defend well.
"They’ve put a very, very, very expensive acquisition on and he’s pretty good in the air. I’ve just watched it and he and Tommy Smith are head to head and it’s just one of those.
"Sometimes you get a head on it and it flies in, sometimes you don’t, that’s what’s happened. He’s started to pay a bit back I would say.”
He added: "For all the talk this week that we are a direct, long-ball team and they’re quite the opposite, the irony is that the goal comes when they’ve put somebody on and they’ve launched it up to his head.
"You need to have Plan A and Plan B. They got a corner kick from it because we couldn’t deal with the first one and they scored with the ball [into the box] and they continued to put it on his head.
"There are all different ways of playing, aren’t there? And I think they should all be respected, to be honest.”
There were numerous candidates in the Town side for the man of the match award, which pleased the Blues manager.
"It’s nice when you have a good team performance, and it was,” he continued. "We’ve had to play well, we’ve had to defend well, we’ve had to work hard.
"Over all the game, I would say 1-1 is fair but, of course, when you get so close to winning it and what it would have done for us, it’s doubly disappointed.”
Does he believe Town’s chance of winning automatic promotion is now over having failed to win? "Probably. I keep saying it is and it isn’t. I don’t know what will happen. We might go to Huddersfield and win and then win the next two and suddenly [it’s on].
"It’s up to them. If the others keep winning there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s nothing we can do except play our games and see what results we get.”
McCarthy’s believes the Cherries are the best team in the division: "They are. We’ve played exceptionally well against them twice. I’ve come away and I’m happy with a point, in the end. It’s another point to the total that we’ll end up with on May 2nd.
"If we end up in the play-offs by a point we might be looking back saying ’Wow, what a save that was from Bart’. Everybody looks back and tells me what point cost us, I prefer to look back and see what point maybe did it for us, and this might be the one.
"I’ve heard a lot this week about the way we play and what we do and how we do it. All I think is that Ipswich have got a team to be proud of and we are a real threat to anybody that we play against.
"I can’t imagine anybody’s sitting there thinking ‘Great, we’ve got Ipswich to play next week’ because that’s probably not the case. So let’s hope we get in the play-offs and we can compete with them.”
Asked whether he had any thoughts on complaints that some of the Bournemouth players went to ground too easily, McCarthy wouldn’t be drawn: "Not really, no.”
Cherries boss Eddie Howe was pleased to gain a point having been behind: "I thought we did really well in the first half after we conceded the goal, we recovered quite well and played some good football.
"I thought in the second half we got stuck with too much direct play. Ipswich pressed very well, they constantly turn you and ask questions of your back four and put you under pressure and I didn’t think we dealt with that very well and ended up chucking the ball back to them too much, which didn’t suit us.
"But once we made the changes we scored probably an ‘unBournemouth’ goal but equally effective, from a set piece.
"It was good to see because we haven’t come back from losing positions enough this season so that could be a big point for us.”