Town boss Mick McCarthy admits he needed the performance in last week’s 2-2 home draw with Reading after the disappointing display as the Blues were comfortably beaten 3-0 by Derby at Portman Road a few days earlier.
Asked whether the tough run of games coming up - the visits to Aston Villa and Brighton, the home match with Leeds and then the East Anglian derby against Norwich at Carrow Road - are a little less daunting after the performance against the Royals rather than a repeat of the display against Derby, McCarthy said: "You might have been talking to somebody else, I don’t know.”
Quizzed on whether that was a semi-tongue-in-cheek comment, he added: "I didn’t like the Derby performance.”
Does he mean he was on the edge after the Rams game? "No, I’d have waited and seen. We’ve played really well, I just [saw] how we did on Saturday, I’ll take it game by game myself and that was a really good performance, a performance that I would be proud to put out every week.
"And I think all the others were, but that made a difference with the players that came in, having those players available and I could play them.
"I’d take that over the next 16 games, just give me that performance and we’ll be fine.”
He added: "I needed that for myself. I want to feel good about it as well, by the way. I don’t like feeling bad about how we're playing.”
McCarthy says he’ll still consider his future in the summer - "absolutely” - but says it hadn’t become a case of making that assessment after each match following the Derby defeat.
"Not really, I wanted a performance after Derby, and we got it, which is always good,” he continued. "Players respond to you, the new players come in, that’s always encouraging.”
He says the performance against the Royals is something to build on: "I’m glad because that makes me feel better. I can’t honestly say I was that encouraged by some of the performances we’ve had, in fact I was discouraged by [some of them].
"We’ve had a good one and then a couple of bad ones but Saturday was a really good performance against a very good side, who we didn’t give many chances to, we stopped them playing.
"They had lots of possession but didn’t do anything with it in terms of chances and I thought we should have won the game. And - seems it’s going that way - we would have but for a 30-yard-plus shot which flies in the bottom corner and even beats Bartosz, which has been hard to do.”