Town boss Paul Cook says the captaincy may have been a “heavy weight” on the shoulders of Tuesday’s hat-trick hero Lee Evans in the season’s early games.
Evans, who joined the Blues on a free transfer after leaving Wigan in the summer, was handed the armband in pre-season and continued to wear it whenever he was in the team in the early weeks of the campaign proper, before it was handed on to Sam Morsy, Cook’s captain at Chesterfield and Wigan, once the Egyptian international had completed the suspension which was hanging over from his last game at Middlesbrough.
The Welshman, who played alongside Morsy with the Latics, came across as very down to earth in his post-match chat with the press having claimed the first treble of his career against Doncaster Rovers at Portman Road on Tuesday.
"Absolutely, he’s a really nice lad, and no different than a lot of the guys who came in in the summer,” Cook said.
"The pressure of playing for big clubs is there for all to see. You come out in front of 22, 23,000 and for some of the lads it was probably a little bit much, probably a little bit new, it was probably a little bit [where they were] looking to someone else to do the job to make it right.
"And Lee was given the captaincy, I think it was common knowledge that we were searching for a captain. Lee never got brought in to be captain, but Lee was probably the best candidate around at that time.
"And Lee’s probably felt a little bit, I don’t like using the word pressure because I think that’s a strange word, isn’t it? But it was a little bit of a heavy weight on his shoulders shall we say.
"Now all of a sudden, he knows Samy inside out, they’ve obviously played together a lot.
"Samy’s not just been brought in to play with Lee Evans, you’ve got make that clear.
"Tom Carroll’s just played two games at Lincoln and against Sheffield Wednesday when he was possibly our best player in both games. Idris [El Mizouni] came in against Sheffield Wednesday and was outstanding.
"We’ve got really good competition for places in our team now, and all of a sudden we’ve got a couple of men in the team as well that can lead by example.
"So I think it complements Lee Evans, I think it complements a lot of the other players in the team and hopefully it contributes to a really good team ethic.”