David Cornell loves working with Town goalkeeping coach Jimmy Walker and admits he is in love with the preferred style of play at Portman Road — but he doesn’t deny he had some explaining to do when he returned home from Saturday’s FA Cup defeat by Portsmouth.
No sooner had Cornell, who also answers to Dai, reached his local base than he underlined his dedication to improvement, and his quest to oust Tomas Holy as the club’s number one keeper, by sitting down to watch a re-run of the Blues’ first round KO by their League One rivals.
The Welshman, who also answers to Dai, laughed: "It was one of the first things I did. My missus wasn’t happy but that’s just love of the game and trying to improve every day, plus it’s always nice to see your ugly mug on TV again.
"That’s always been my way. We all want to improve and become the best version of ourselves that we can and coming off the pitch I was feeling I hadn’t done myself justice.
"I wanted to get home and see the game back again so that I could pick out areas where I could improve and do it better, simple as that really.
"I had a look on Saturday evening and again on Sunday, just on a personal basis. I’ll have a chat with Jimmy today [Monday] at training to go through some bits and bobs then we’ll crack on to have a look at Crawley for tomorrow night.”
Cornell was a first-team regular at previous club Northampton but although he helped the Cobblers to win promotion from League Two last season he moved on in the summer to enter a new chapter of his career in Suffolk.
Although he has only featured so far in the club’s cup games — tomorrow’s Papa John’s Trophy tie with Crawley will represent his fifth outing in the current campaign — Cornell is determined to eventually overtake Holy and become the club’s first-choice goalkeeper.
He added: "I love working with Jimmy. I can’t speak highly enough of him and I’ve enjoyed every single session with him since I signed for Ipswich.
"I spoke to him when I first came in and he had seen areas of my game that he wanted to help me improve and we’ve been working hard on that since the day I joined. I feel as if I’ve been improving every day and I hope that will carry on.
"I think every goalkeeping coach is different. They have different methods in training and they have their own personalities because they’re different people, so the way they treat the goalkeepers they work with is going to be different as well. Jimmy is good at his job and all the keepers like him.”
Manager Paul Lambert’s decision to implement a style of play that relies on playing out from the back has also found favour with Cornell, who continued: "I love it because it’s something I was brought up on for a long time at Swansea.
"I had to come away from that for a couple of years with the style of play my previous team was playing, so it took a couple of weeks when I came here to get back to seeing the pictures of playing out from the back.
"I think it’s something that I’ll only improve on and keep getting better at the more we do it. I do a lot of work in training with the ball at my feet.
"Obviously, the number one aim is to keep the ball out of the net, but do a lot of work on patterns of play, pictures of the next move and seeing things early.
"I think I’m the same as 99 per cent of goalkeepers in that I started as an outfield player and worked my way back. It was because I couldn’t run far enough that I ended up in goal!”