Town boss Mick McCarthy takes his team to Rotherham on Saturday looking to build on Tuesday’s return to winning ways, the Blues having defeated Bolton Wanderers 2-0 at Portman Road. Despite the Millers being bottom of the Championship, he says his team will have to play as well as they did against the Trotters to pick up all three points at the New York Stadium, where they lost 2-0 last season.
"It’s vital we keep picking up points and if we can pick up a win [that would be great],” McCarthy said.
"But I don’t want anybody thinking it’s going to be easy going there. We went there last year and got a bit of a doing.
"They’re fighting for their lives. They’ve got a good coach/manager in Neil Redfearn, who did well at Leeds. That had no bearing on what was going to happen to him.
"And they’ve got good Championship players, like we keep saying about the teams that have come here - Bristol City had a good squad, Huddersfield had a good squad, I thought Bolton had a good squad of competent, some good Championship players.
"And that’s what we’ll be facing on Saturday. We’ll have to play equally as well again, as we did on Tuesday night to go there and win.”
Having finally halted their winless run at seven against Bolton, McCarthy felt the victory had been coming.
"We’d played well in the previous two games, I thought. We let it slip at Nottingham Forest, we couldn’t put it to bed against Cardiff, but they were both good performances.
"Tuesday night was a really good performance and we could have been better off [in terms of goals] but as I said both before and afterwards, I would have taken a scruffy 1-0 win of any sort just to get the three points. But the three points and a good performance was lovely.”
He says the win has inevitably lightened the mood around Playford Road: "Of course it has, me included. My wife Fiona said to me yesterday ‘It’s nice to have Mick back, to have my lovely husband back’. I can’t remember when that was! I take her point and I think I’d been OK, so that tells you.
"It puts a spring in everyone’s step again. We’ve not been losing games, it’s been the inability to turn them into wins - Brentford, Nottingham Forest and the games at home.
"I think we’re [joint-eighth] in terms of losing [the fewest] games but we’ve drawn far more than others, and performances haven’t been that bad.
"Even Reading, it was a horrible result but it wasn’t such a bad performance up until late on in the game.
"Blackburn’s the one that was just a really poor performance and when we weren't competitive. But we’ve been building up to the performance on Tuesday night.”
McCarthy admits that as a manager you have to make efforts to keep everybody up when things aren’t going well: "Sometimes you have the red nose, silly hat and juggling routine just to make sure that if I’m OK everybody else is OK, and I am when I’m around the place.
"There’s no doubt that it takes its toll on you and it does as a player, but if you let it get to you, if suddenly everything changes, your demeanour changes, your personality changes, I think that’s when results start going tits up completely.
"And they haven’t been. We’ve not been losing game after game after game, we’ve just not been able to win some of them, which has been disappointing but nevertheless we’ve been competitive in most of them, and certainly in the last three we’ve been far better.
"The performances have warranted better results, certainly at Forest and against Cardiff, which was a good game and a draw was probably a fair result. I said last year we would probably have nicked it.”
Having finally ended the run, McCarthy says he wasn’t ebullient as such the following day but more on an even keel: "I just felt normal. I wasn’t walking around with a big smile on my face.
"If I’d have come and and we’d have lost I’d been scowling and felt lousy. It’s a nice feeling not to have that nagging ‘What if we’d have done that?’, ‘What if we could have done this?’,’What if this had happened?’, ‘What if that had happened?’, have that constant thought process going on in your head.
"You can just relax your head for a while and enjoy the fact. You’re not walking around thinking ‘We’ve won!’, it just takes away some of that bloody stress and nonsense which goes on in your head when you’ve been beaten.”
The Town boss felt Daryl Murphy’s display typified his side when they’re on their game: "I think what epitomises that was Murph’s performance on Tuesday night.
"No, he didn’t score his goal, but he got chances and he got chances because he backed into people, he was hard to knock off the ball, he stuck it up front for us, he chased everything, we got chances off blocks and tackles from the front two. I thought they were excellent, the pair of them.
"That epitomises what my team’s about normally and it hadn’t been happening for whatever reason.
"Not to such a great degree, to be honest, but to a degree that we couldn’t put teams to the sword here, whereas last year we probably would have done.”
He added: "We’ve always been good at the ugly side of the game, stopping teams playing, working hard and we’ve tried to be expansive and change it and maybe on Tuesday night that all came to fruition.
"It did at Brentford actually, it did against Burnley here and Sheffield Wednesday when we were winning games.
"That was all in evidence then, but we just lost it for a while. That was a really good, expansive performance, but we still had to dig in because Bolton had periods in the game when we had to defend."
Despite the visit to the New York Stadium being the third match in eight days, McCarthy seems unlikely to make many if any changes.
Dean Gerken will continue in goal with the back four of, from the right, skipper Luke Chambers, Tommy Smith, Christophe Berra and Jonas Knudsen also appearing certain starters.
In midfield, Ainsley Maitland-Niles is expected to be over the foot injury which forced him off against Bolton and is again likely to be in midfield alongside Cole Skuse and Kevin Bru.
Up front, Murphy again seems set to be joined by Freddie Sears and Brett Pitman with David McGoldrick - who is a doubt with a groin problem - on the bench if he is considered fit enough to make the trip.
If McCarthy lines his team up in a 4-4-2 system Sears is likely to be on the right with Maitland-Niles on the left.
Millers boss Neil Redfearn is anticipating a difficult match: "It’s going to be a tough game because Ipswich are a good side.
"They just missed out last year and they’ve had a bit of a wobble recently but now they’ve found a bit of form again. Whenever you come up against a Mick McCarthy side they’re good and well-organised.
"It’s going to be a tough game for us but we’ve got to look at it like we can go and get points out of it and I think we can.”
Redfearn is hoping striker Matt Derbyshire (knee and ankle) and midfielder and skipper Lee Frecklington (calf) will be fit enough to be involved against the Blues as the Millers look to get back to winning ways after six games without a victory.
Their most recent three points came via a 2-0 victory at Birmingham on September 26th, while their last home win came a week earlier when Cardiff were defeated 2-1.
Rotherham have signed Manchester City youngster Brandon Barker on a youth loan subject to the paperwork being rubberstamped. Talks are also ongoing with Southampton regarding another young player, while former Ireland striker Leon Best is on trial.
The Blues have won 13 of the previous games between the sides, all of which have been in the league, seven have ended in draws, with the Millers having won six.
In February, Town’s first ever visit to the New York Stadium ended in defeat as a goal in either half from Matt Derbyshire and ex-Blues loanee Conor Sammon saw Rotherham to a 2-0 victory.
Derbyshire nodded home the opener in the 38th minute and Sammon added the second on 64, while Daryl Murphy, who failed to take two early opportunities for Town, saw a header cleared off the line and Luke Chambers had an effort well saved.
In September last year at Portman Road, strike pair Daryl Murphy and David McGoldrick netted in the third and sixth minutes as Town took their winning run to four games via a 2-0 home victory to move up to fourth in the table.
Murphy nodded home from close range following a corner, before McGoldrick smashed a strike into the net from 25 yards.
The Rotherham squad includes ex-Town loanees Danny Collins, Frazer Richardson and Paul Green.
Centre-half Collins made 16 starts and scored three goals while on loan from Stoke between August and December 2011. The 35-year-old joined the Millers in the close season after leaving Nottingham Forest.
Full-back Richardson, 33, made three starts and four sub appearances between January and May 2014 while on loan from Middlesbrough. He moved to Rotherham that summer.
Irish international midfielder Paul Green joined the Blues on loan from Leeds in February 2014 and left at the end of the season when he joined the South Yorkshiremen. The 32-year-old made six starts and eight sub appearances for the Blues and scored two goals.
No member of the current Town squad has played for the Millers, but academy coach Alan Lee had a successful spell at Millmoor between 2000 and 2003 and fitness coach Andy Liddell was briefly a player and caretaker-manager there late in his career.
Prior to Saturday’s kick-off there will be a minute's silence ahead of Remembrance Sunday.
Saturday’s referee is Darren Drysdale from Lincolnshire, who has shown 34 yellow cards and one red in 12 games so far this season.
Drysdale’s most recent Town match was the 2-0 away win at Brighton in March 2014 in which he booked Tommy Smith and one home player. Earlier that season he was in charge of the 1-1 draw at Birmingham.
Town squad from: Gerken, Bialkowski, Chambers (c), Knudsen, Parr, Emmanuel, Berra, Smith, Malarczyk, Skuse, Douglas, Bru, Coke, Tabb, Maitland-Niles, Touré, Oar, Sears, Pitman, Murphy, McGoldrick.