Blues boss Mick McCarthy isn’t surprised that some fans are calling for his head following Town’s recent run of poor form, but says the subject didn’t even come up when he spoke to owner Marcus Evans on Wednesday.
"That’s the first I’ve heard!” McCarthy said when quizzed about the minority calling for a change at the top. "It doesn’t surprise me at all because that’s what football fans do.
"It doesn’t disappoint me, it doesn’t surprise me and it doesn’t worry me because that’s just the way it is.
"I guess at some stage I will leave the club, who knows when. But if there’s somebody who can do it on what I’ve done it and do what I’ve done then good luck to them, those that want that.
"I think the majority of them wouldn’t. I’ve never heard that and I’ve never given it any concern that that would be the case.
"But it doesn’t surprise me, it happens everywhere. Look at the number of managers that get changed.
"It’s usually down to bonkers owners and chairmen rather than football fans that get you out. Fortunately I’ve got a very sensible one.
"I spoke to him yesterday, I had a good conversation with him, he’d watched the game. That subject never came up, that’s for sure, we were just talking about the game and Saturday’s game.”
He says fan frustration doesn’t impact upon his approach: "It doesn’t affect me in terms of how I do things. Of course it bothers me because I prefer my team to be playing well and winning games and fans to be happy.
"Fans only become grumpy when you’re losing games and not playing well. So, from that point of view that bothers me.
"But if you’re asking whether it bothers me in terms of upsetting me, no it doesn’t, because that’s just the way football is. They love you if you’re winning and they hate you if you’re losing.”
McCarthy is confident that the Blues will be able to arrest their current slump and says the way he deals with adversity has changed since he was a young manager at Millwall in the early 1990s.
"Absolutely, yes,” he added. "I’m certainly more understanding of the way football works. I’m 24 years older than I was. Do you act differently to when you were younger? We all do.
"I’ve gained a helluva lot of experience, knowledge and, you might not think it sometimes, but a little bit more calm and a bit more perspective in my life than I had when I was 32 or 33 getting the Millwall job.”
Despite having admitted that he’s currently in his toughest spell with the Blues, he says he doesn’t let it get to him.
"I’d have been in trouble throughout my career if every time that something went [wrong], even as a player when you’re having a tough time you get twitchy and you let it affect you,” he continued.
"Of course it affects us, it affects me like it affects everybody else and if somebody is going to sit here and say it doesn’t affect you then they’d be lying. It’s how it affects you.
"I work harder, am more diligent, if I could be, trying to find a reason and a solution to it. But I don’t go home and have sleepless nights and I don’t go home and kick the dog and treat people badly because we’re getting beat.
"It doesn’t affect my personality that way. I might be a little bit quieter in the car going home when we’ve lost.”
He says turning Town’s season around isn’t a case of finding one underlying cause to the downturn: "We analyse every game after we’ve played them and there have been a whole number of reasons, I guess, but far too long-winded to be getting into them here.
"And it would be a bit too simplistic to say we’ve been unlucky because we haven’t been unlucky in every game.
"There have been times when we’ve given goals away, there have been times when teams have had a stroke of luck, Bristol City, we’d just scored and they had a deflection which no one could have done anything about.
"What was disappointing was they we let one in almost immediately afterwards. There are a load of reasons but not individual ones, if I could do that then I would have stopped it a long time before now, wouldn’t I?”
He says there’s no easy remedy when clubs are in bad runs: "Quite clearly it’s not easy to come up with a fix. When Norwich were getting relegated two years ago, if they had said to the manager, to Chrissy Hughton then ‘By the way, there’s a fix here for us, are you going to find it?’
"When I was at Wolves and we were going down and I got the sack, if there was a fix I’d have got it, I’d have found it. There’s not an easy fix for any of us.
"And there are a lot of other teams in our league looking for a fix at the minute. I’ll tell you what it is, it’s a tough league, a very close league, a relentless league, games come thick and fast and I think it’s a stronger league than it was last year.”