Town boss Mick McCarthy says the squad got back from Bolton at 4.10am on Wednesday morning with the Blues making a similarly lengthy trip to Cardiff today ahead of Saturday’s match. By the time the players, staff and travelling fans return to Suffolk after the game against the Bluebirds they will have covered almost 1,000 miles this week.
"Every journey’s better if you’ve got three points and you haven’t conceded in the 96th minute,” McCarthy said, whose players underwent another cryotherapy session at Playford Road yesterday to aid their recovery from Tuesday's game.
"But it doesn’t make it any shorter, it just feels shorter, that’s all. It’s just a long way, but we are geographically challenged in terms of getting around the country, aren’t we? And Bolton had to come here on a Tuesday night as well.
"It was 10 past four when we got in, into bed at half-four, at quarter-to-five I’m still looking at the watch. Up at 10 past eight so it was a short night, it was a microwave sleep, actually!
"I’m all right, I’m fine with it, it’s the players that need the rest and need to be able to go.
"And having played as hard as we have to play to get results and to have to sit on the bus for another five hours coming back, that’s tough on them.
"It’s not physically tough, but it’s tough then to have to get up and be running around. It’s tough in terms of seizing up and your legs get stiff and then you’ve got to go again on Saturday having travelled down.
"But it’s a luxury problem, we’re sat on a bus with leather seats and we’ve all got iPads and we can all watch the telly, we can all have coffees. Don’t anybody think I’m saying it’s tough from that point of view.
"For me it’s a piece of cake. I love getting on the bus. Get on the bus, earphones on, watch a DVD, the phone doesn’t ring, it’s absolutely brilliant, I love it. But as a player I whinged, I used to hate all that. You just want to be outside.”
He says flying to games doesn’t really save too much time and not everyone is comfortable doing so: "It doesn’t always rest easy with the lads and if you consider what we do when we’re going up to the North-West, for instance.
"We leave here to get to Cambridge, which is an hour and a quarter. We’re usually there an hour and a quarter before, so we’ve done two and a half hours and then whatever the flight is, 45 minutes.
"We’re three and a bit hours before we land and get through and then we get the coach, so it’s taken us four and a half hours, five hours sometimes to get to the same destination, whereas we can jump on the bus here, sit on it, we stop at a services, get out and have a walk.
"And, I have to say, if you get a windy, bad flight, not everybody’s keen on flying. If we could just jump on a flight from somewhere in Ipswich and fly to the destination without a doubt [it would be easier] but it doesn’t always make it better.
"Sometimes it does, when we flew back from Manchester, that made it a lot easier, we went to Southend Airport. Even then I think it was still two o’clock when we got back as opposed to four o’clock.”