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Lambert Not Giving Up on Play-Offs - Ipswich Town News

Boss Paul Lambert was insisting that the Blues are still targeting a play-off place at his morning press conference which took place ahead of confirmation that tomorrow's game at Bristol Rovers is off due to the EFL's suspension of fixtures until April 3rd.

Lambert reiterated his previous message that the Blues, who are 10th having lost their last four, seven points off the top six with eight matches to play, aren’t giving up and are taking each match as it comes.

"Win as many as you can,” he said. "Every game we play we try to win, one game at a time, go and try and win it.”

Asked whether he still believed the Blues could make the play-offs, he added: "I wasn’t too discouraged by the performance last Saturday. We played a good game and we had no strikers.

"We had a young striker coming on who is 18 years old and learning the game, young Tyreece Simpson.

"But that’s where the club is, realistically Ipswich should be having big players coming off the bench, but we aren’t at that stage now, we have to build and develop our own in certain aspects, but we’ll just go and try and win.”

Some fans have suggested that the season should now be a case of preparing for next season with youngsters such as Simpson and Armando Dobra given games to give them experience, however, Lambert believes otherwise.

"No, never give up,” he insisted. "I’m not built that way and it doesn’t come into my make-up that, my make-up is to win and we’ll go and do our best to try and achieve it.”

Reflecting further on the Coventry game, he added: "The performance was a lot better. We had one or two little chances, Coventry had one real chance and scored.

"But the performance was a lot better, which was pleasing, we just need to build on that, and we’ll try and build on that.”

Earlier on in the season the Blues had an outstanding away record, however, they have won just once on their travels - at Tranmere - since beating Rochdale on November 5th, while their home record has been patchy at best throughout the campaign.

"We’ve just done it the other way around,” Lambert reflected on the home-away disparity.

"The home form has been no good and the away form has been really good. I’ve got my own reasons for that, a different scenario.

"But we just have to get back winning, it doesn’t matter if it’s home or away, and we’re more than capable of doing it.

"We don’t go into any game thinking we are going to play defensively or for a draw. You can ask anybody here, I’m not like that, we just go try and win.”

Meanwhile, Lambert says ideally he'd like a settled number one having changed his keepers in recent weeks, Will Norris having come in for Tomas Holy last weekend, the on-loan Wolves man having been replaced by the Czech in early February.

"You’d like a settled number one," he said. "It’s different if it’s the cup games, you can change then.

"I just thought Will for that particular game was the right choice, and to be fair he never had a save, he never had one save to make.

"He picks the ball out the net, but that’s been the story of the last few weeks with Tomas as well, not really had a save to make. I just felt Will’s calming influence would have helped us last week.”

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