Boss Mick McCarthy conceded that Town were “beaten by a much better team” following their 2-0 home defeat to Fulham and reiterated that he remains committed to the Blues but admitted it’ll be “a tough job to turn” dissenting fans around.
Chris Martin put the dominant Whites in front from a freekick on 36 and sub Ragnar Sigurdsson sealed the win with a header 12 minutes from time.
"Beaten by a much better team, that’s what I think,” a downbeat McCarthy admitted in his press conference afterwards.
Why was there such a gap between the teams? "Maybe they’ve got better players who played better on the day. I think we’ve been well beaten by a very good side.
"I can’t take any criticism away from us because I don’t think we were particularly good, but I think you have to give credit to the opposition when they’re a good side.
"It’s easy for me to come in here and blame my players and say we weren’t any good. We tried our best, as we always do, but they were better than us.”
McCarthy admitted that two wins in the last nine at home is poor and that January will be a key month for the Blues: "I would say so, we better make sure December ends up better than that, we’ve got another game yet.
"We had 18 players today and we’ve got to do better, all of us, because that was poor.”
The disappointing performance and result led to chants aimed at both McCarthy and owner Marcus Evans and the Blues manager said he can understand the reaction: "I can, I can’t complain about that either.”
While there were chants for Evans to ‘sort it out’, for the first time a section of the Sir Bobby Robson Stand called for McCarthy’s departure.
"I haven’t changed a lot, so whatever I’m doing now is not [different] from four years ago,” he said when asked about the chants aimed in his direction.
"But maybe that’s the point, I’ve been here four years. I fully understand it and it’s their right to shout, they come and want to watch and see better football than that and see us win at home, not [win only two in nine].
"I’ve no complaints about it at all. I much preferred it when it was supportive and it was ‘Super Mick’, but I told you before, I realised when that was being sung that it can change very quickly. It’s going to be a tough job to turn that around now.
"We’ve got a game on Friday and we need to play much better than that, we need to win, we need to give them a good performance and a victory. If we don’t it’ll only be worse than it has been today.”
At Wednesday’s AGM McCarthy said he has 18 months left on his contract and plans to work hard to turn things around and his position remained the same after the match.
"Very much so,” he said. "I won’t be resigning in the morning, if that’s what you’re asking me. I’ll be here on Friday for the game and will keep scrapping as I always do. It’s been made harder, that’s for sure.”
Has Fulham’s dominance made him think he might need to make more January additions than he had planned previously?
"There’s only going to be a certain amount of business that we can do anyway,” he said.
"Just because we’ve been beaten by a team that’s played really well and we’ve not well doesn’t suddenly mean we’re going to go out and get twice as many players as I thought we were going to get. We’ll try and do our business as we always have.”
He has always said owner Evans has been supportive, is January a time for him to show that backing? "I’ve told you all along, I’ve always had his support and I don’t think that’ll be any different in January.”
McCarthy says he and Evans will have their usual post-match phone call today or tomorrow: "Why would that change?”"
Youngster Andre Dozzell was given his first home Championship start of the season, was it perhaps not the right game for the 17-year-old the way it eventually panned out?
"That looks the case but had we been on top and he’d played great you’d have been saying ‘Well done Mick for playing Andre at home in that game’. Who knows?
"It’s a difficult environment for him to be playing in, that’s not a learning environment for somebody to come in and play and expect to play well. Their three in midfield were excellent.”
What did he tell his players afterwards? "The dressing room is sacrosanct for me. I guess it’s a flavour of what I’ve said here. I’ve not dressed it up in terms of ‘We were unlucky’. We’ve been beaten, we could have been beaten by more.
"And I guess we all need to pull together for Friday and have a performance and try and get a result. That’s the flavour of it. But if you ask what I said and how I said it, I’m never going to tell you that.”
Fulham manager Slavisa Jokanovic was delighted with his team’s performance and the result.
"We are very happy with how we played today,” he said. "It’s a very good Boxing Day for us, an important three points for us continuing fighting for important targets.
"We made another clean sheet, we dominated the game. At the end Ipswich hadn’t hit a shot on target, which is good news for us.
"This time we created many, many, many chances but we didn’t score a second goal in moments when we were dominating very well. But in the end we scored the goal which closed out the game.”