Boss Mick McCarthy hailed the Blues’ 1-0 win at Huddersfield as a “huge result”, Ben Pringle’s first goal for Town having seen his side back to winning ways after three successive defeats.
"It’s a huge result for us,” he said. "We needed a win, we needed to stop being beaten having been beaten three on the bounce and, as usual my lads, as the do more often than not, come up trumps when we’ve got our backs to the wall, and they’ve done it again today.
"Absolutely we rode our luck in the first half, but I could go back to the QPR game when we rode our luck in the first half and in the second half I thought we were going to win it and we lost it in the final minute.
"It’s very often a game of good luck/bad luck no matter how well you play. There are all sorts of ways of winning a game. For all the chances they had in the first half they didn’t score them.
"We were clinical with ours, which is the difference between winning and losing, unfortunately for them and fortunately for us.”
He admitted he had become frustrated with recent results and with a number of regulars unavailable to him: "I was down and upset and angry at losing three on the bounce, which I don’t think has happened during my tenure at Ipswich.
"A little bit frustrated at having lost good players [due to injury]. Not bothered about the play-offs. All you can do is get enough points and to be fair I think it took the pressure of us, I get sick of talking about the play-offs.
"If we end up in the play-offs, brilliant. If we don’t, there won’t be a damned thing I can do about it and we’ll have tried our best. Brilliant, we’ve got three points and we’ll just keep trying to do that.”
He added: "We want to be there, we all know that, but when you’re just in them in sixth spot, you’ve got to stay there. If you don’t stay there everybody’s just so disappointed and downbeat.
"[It gets like that] with us, with the club, with the town because we’re not in the play-offs. It’ll be determined on May 7th. That's what happened last year, I keep saying so.
"Maybe it did just take the pressure off. I said to the lads yesterday, ‘We’ve no chance of getting in the play-offs the way it’s going. The only way we can do it is to stop thinking about the play-offs and get three points from somewhere’. And we’ve done that.”
He admitted the result was a relief: "Without a doubt. I’m not going to be coming in here and putting a stoic face on and say I was never worried about it.
"If we’d have gone away from here and we’d lost four on the bounce I can’t imagine that happening, not in this league. I’ve done it in the Premier League, which is more than easy to do if you haven’t got the right team. Our lads just proved to me what a great set of lads they are.
"Yes, we rode our luck, surely everybody needs a bit of luck. Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Good luck Mick, but you don’t need it’. I said ‘I’ll take it if it’s going’ because if you get some of the other stuff, the bad luck, it’s a pretty shitty let me tell you.”
He says he switched his system, with Brett Pitman ending up wide on the left with Freddie Sears on the right, as his side weren’t in the game in the opening 20 minutes or so.
"We went to 4-3-3 because they were overrunning us,” he said. "I’m not that thick or proud about how I’ve set my team up that I’m going just going to keep doing it if it’s not working.
"That effectively stemmed the tide. We got the goal from it. We were still a bit out of kilter and a bit higgledy-piggledy in the middle because I’d changed it and they got a few chances.
"I don’t think we defended as well in the first half as we did in the second and they got a few chances out of it but we still kept the ball out of our net.”
McCarthy had praise for Daryl Murphy, who created Pringle’s goal when he forced Joel Lynch into a mistake.
"I spoke to him on Thursday or Friday morning, I think he had 19 goals at this stage last season, he’s got eight now, miles away from what he had last year,” he added.
"But last year was an unbelievable year for him. If he’s not scoring when he’s playing well, if he’s roughing centre-backs up and chasing in channels, sticking it and working hard, other people get the benefit from it.
"I said to him, ‘I don’t give a flying one whether you score the goals providing you’re setting other people up and upsetting back fours’.
"I thought he was great today and Freddie Sears was just outstanding. He’s been really good for us, outstanding since he signed and this season he’s been good.
"And he does it so selflessly, whether he’s up top, wide right, wide left, you can’t buy that. That’s just a lovely asset to have, somebody who can play but doesn’t mind doing it for the team.”
#itfc goalscorer @BenPringle18 reflects on today's important away win at Huddersfield to Ipswich Player HD.https://t.co/gxgOZHyUvI– Ipswich Town FC (@Official_ITFC) February 27, 2016
Regarding goalscorer Pringle he said: "I think there’s more to come from him, he’d not played that much before he came. I’m pleased with him, delighted for him today.”
Huddersfield manager David Wagner was pleased with the way his team played, if not with the result.
"On one side I’m very happy, I’m very pleased with the performance from my team,” he said. "I think the first half was excellent, was fantastic. We only miss the right result. The second half was probably only average.
"Then on the other side, I’m disappointed about the result but I think this is part of the game.
"I think there’s no doubt today that we did a good job. The performance was good. We made some easy mistakes in our offence and our defence and then we got a result we normally wouldn’t deserve if we had had nearly 70 per cent ball possession, 21-6 shots on goal. I think that says everything about the game.
"But in the end the result is the most important thing and we didn’t get it today and this is what we have to accept because it’s part of the game. But there’s no doubt we did a good job.”