Town boss Mick McCarthy expects tonight’s opponents Burnley to quickly adjust to life back in the Championship following their relegation from the Premier League last season (KO 7.45pm).
The Clarets visit Portman Road this evening having picked up a point from each of their first two Championship games, a 1-1 draw at Leeds and 2-2 stalemate at home to Birmingham, and having exited the Capital One Cup to League One Port Vale.
But under manager Sean Dyche, the man who took them into the Premier League in 2013/14, he expects the Lancastrians to adapt to life back in the second tier sooner rather than later.
"Dychey knows the league, he’s been there, the players know it,” McCarthy said. "They didn’t go out and buy loads of Premier League players who hadn’t played in it or foreign players who hadn’t played in the Championship.
"They’ll understand it and I think they’ll get their head around it pretty quickly. But it does take a period of adjustment.
"They come back into it and suddenly it’s Saturday-Tuesday, Saturday-Tuesday, you stay in the cup, you’ve got another game. It just seems relentless, but they’ll be fine because he was impressive, Sean, in the year they got promoted.”
He added: "If you really sit and analyse all of it, when [teams] get relegated, they probably got double their money when they got into the Premier League.
"They got full houses every week, they went to the Emirates, Old Trafford and all the rest, and when you get relegated none of them want to be in the Championship, they all want to be back in the Premier League.
"They’ve probably had their wages cut back in half, their bonuses are all different. They’re not going to the stadiums that they had been going to.
"So, it is a bit of a reality check. And you have to get yourself at it and get back to playing well.
"I had it at Sunderland. I joined when there were nine games to go. Somebody thought I was going to keep them up but that was mission impossible.
"And then we lost our first two games in the Championship, lost 11 on the bounce, the last nine games in the Premier League and then those two.
"It was almost like we needed a jump-start. Funnily enough we ended up going to [Town's weekend opponents] Preston and we beat them 2-0 and we finished in the play-offs that year.
"But it did take a lot of getting used to, a lot of players had to leave, a lot of players who had been used to playing in the Premier League.
"You have to crack a few heads sometimes to get through to them that we’re back in the Championship, this is what we’ve got, this is what we need to do, this is how we need to do it. But Dychey’s more than capable of that.”
McCarthy recalls speaking to Dyche back in the summer of 2013 when he was building a team which finished second in the table on a relative shoestring, taking a similar approach to the Blues boss has in his time at Town.
"I spoke to him in the summer at the start of their promotion season and he hadn’t got a big budget,” he remembered. "Dave Jones, who I’d signed at Wolves, had walked in the door on trial.
"He’d got players there, but he took Dean Marney, he took Michael Kightly from Stoke. He didn’t spend a great deal of money and they got promoted.
"They were such a real, tough, resolute team but with some really good football and played off a shape, and they’re still doing the same and I expect a really tough game.
"I remember the game we lost to them down here when Scott Arfield scored with a header. There wasn’t a thing between us but that goal and we might find it’s the same on Tuesday.”
McCarthy felt the key to Burnley’s promotion was their 47-goal front pairing: "They had Sam Vokes and Danny Ings the year they got promoted and that was virtually the difference between us then.
"There are similarities, we didn’t work on big budgets. I think they’re working on a bigger budget than we are now, though.
"Both of us played 4-4-2, we were both pretty tough and hard to beat and that team that got promoted had all the qualities needed to get out of the Championship.”
Clarets winger Michael Kightly is another player well-known to McCarthy having been a member of his 2008/09 Championship-winning Wolves side.
"Kights is terrific, he scored the winner against us at the end of the season they got promoted. He was terrific for me, a lovely fella and a good player.”
Regarding his current wing pairing with Town, 17-year-old Ainsley Maitland-Niles and Ryan Fraser, 21, McCarthy isn’t expecting them to play every game, but says few players will with matches coming thick and fast in the Championship.
"I don’t know too many of them that will get through 46 league games, whether it’s through suspension or some injury or something,” he continued.
"But I think if I went and asked them now if the wanted to play Saturday-Tuesday, Saturday-Tuesday they’d be full of it because it’s the start of the season and they have been very exciting, they’re two very good players.”
McCarthy has plenty of options up front and believes he could field any combination of his strikers.
"Without a doubt,” he insisted. "I think both Freddie and Murph can stretch teams. I think Didz and Brett are more than happy dropping in and playing.
"I saw the versatility of them on Saturday, certainly with Brett when he went and played on the left and did a great job. Didzy played up front almost on his own but worked his socks off and stopped them.
"They’re just good players, there’s no doubt that they can all play. Whatever combination, they’ll be able to play.”
The Town manager is unlikely to stray too far from the team which beat Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday and may well named an unchanged XI.
Bartosz Bialkowski will be in goal with Jonas Knudsen at left-back, skipper Luke Chambers at right-back and Tommy Smith, who was named in the Football League’s Team of the Week yesterday, and Christophe Berra at the centre of the defence.
In midfield, Cole Skuse again looks set to be joined by Jonathan Douglas in the centre with Maitland-Niles on the right and Fraser on the left.
McCarthy has his now-usual decisions to make regarding his strikers but will probably continue with Daryl Murphy and Freddie Sears with David McGoldrick and Brett Pitman playing their part from the bench.
Burnley are waiting for new striker Rouwen Hennings to receive international clearance, while full-back Matt Lowton (shin), midfielder Fredrik Ulvestad (ankle), defender Kevin Long and midfielder Dean Marney (both knee) are back in training but not yet ready to return to match action.
Daniel Lafferty (collarbone), Ashley Barnes (knee) and Jason Gilchrist (ankle) are long-term absentees.
Out-of-favour Blues winger Cameron Stewart spent the first half of the 2012/13 season on loan at Burnley from Hull, making two starts and seven sub appearances.
Clarets boss Dyche has been impressed with what he's seen of the Blues.
"I think they’re a thorough and well-organised unit. They play pretty much a 4-4-2 or a slight variation on that," he told the Burnley club site.
"Mick’s a wily old fox and he’s been in the division for a number of years as well as the Premier League. They’ve got a good manager, good staff and a team that have been close for a couple of seasons.
"We know they’re a strong side, but we think we are so we’ll be ready that’s for sure.”
Tony Loughlan, Roy Keane’s first-team coach during his time at Town, currently fills the same role at Burnley.
The teams last met at Turf Moor on the penultimate weekend of the 2013/14 season with the Clarets already having confirmed their promotion to the Premier League.
Kightly’s 54th minute goal saw the Lancastrians to a 1-0 victory which ended the Blues’ hopes of reaching the play-offs.
Tommy Smith had a first-half header nodded off the line and sub Paul Taylor’s late freekick was well saved, but overall Burnley deserved their victory, which sealed a double over the Blues.
In the previous October at Portman Road, Arfield’s second-half goal saw then-league leaders Burnley to a 1-0 win, their first victory on Suffolk soil since January 1970. The midfielder stooped to head home in the 80th minute of a tight encounter.
Overall, Town have won 18 of the games between the sides (17 in the league), Burnley 13 (13) with a further 10 (10) ending in draws.
Tonight’s referee is Simon Hooper from Wiltshire, who has shown four yellow cards and no reds in three games so far this season.
Hooper’s most recent Town match was the 1-0 defeat at Reading in August last year in which he booked Tyrone Mings, Tommy Smith and Christophe Berra and two home players. Prior to that he was in charge for the 1-0 win at Yeovil the previous season and the 3-0 home win against Crystal Palace in April 2013.
Town squad from: Bialkowski, Gerken, Emmanuel, Knudsen, Kenlock, Parr, Chambers, Berra, Smith, Yorwerth, Skuse, Douglas, Tabb, Coke, McDonnell, Benyu, Maitland-Niles, Fraser, Touré, Henshall, Murphy, McGoldrick, Sears, Pitman.