Boss Kieran McKenna said it was a “disappointed, frustrated dressing room” following the Blues’ 0-0 home draw with Cheltenham Town, but felt the first-half display was his team’s best at Portman Road since he took charge.
The goalless draw, Town’s second in three games, saw the Blues remain ninth still four points off the play-offs.
"It’s a disappointed, frustrated dressing room,” McKenna said. "It can happen over the course of a season where you play [well], certainly in the first half I thought it was a very good performance.
"We put on a really good pressure and created enough chances to go in 1-0 or 2-0 in front at the interval.
"But it doesn’t happen and then the frustration grows and you end up not getting the three points that you wanted and probably deserved.
"It can happen over the course of the season but obviously in the position we’re in everything is amplified a bit, the need to win our home games is amplified and one point is rarely going to be enough for us.
"We’re disappointed, it’s two points dropped and we have to recover quickly and make sure we’re ready for Morecambe and we’ll have to catch those points up later on down the line.”
Having dominated the first half, the Blues weren’t quite so in control in the second and appeared to run out of ideas towards the end.
"I thought the first half was comfortably our best performance in a home game in my time here by a fair way,” McKenna continued.
"We didn’t quite manage to match that in the second half, probably different factors really.
"I think mentally getting in at half-time at 0-0 was a big boost to them after how the game had went. That was a massive mental boost for them to get in at 0-0.
"To be fair, they improved in the second half. I thought there was fatigue in some our play in a few key positions, to be fair. I thought we looked tired, the players have worked every so hard.
"It’s obviously a quick turnaround but it’s the same for all teams, so no excuse. But I thought there was some fatigue in some positions where we rely on really high energy.
"And they managed to break the game up really well, they stopped the game well, there were injuries, there were stoppages, there wasn’t much flow in the game.
"In the first half we managed to keep the ball in play for almost the whole half, there were very few stoppages, we were able to find a rhythm and keep the ball and play and not give them any breaks.
‘Second half, they managed to break the game up better, make it a bit more scrappy and probably as the half went on we got sucked into that more and more and in the last 15 or 20 minutes probably went away from what we were doing well in terms of how we were dominating and creating chances in the first half.
"We’ll learn from this as a group. There are certainly things from the first half that you can see are improving in our game and I think normally we would expect to be at least a goal to the good off of that.
"But we weren’t and we’ll look at the play when we were trying to chase the goal at the end and that’s something we can definitely improve on.”
McKenna made attacking changes with Joe Pigott coming on as a second out-and-out striker alongside Macauley Bonne in the latter stages.
"I said after MK that draws aren’t something we’re really interested in,” he said. "With the position that we’re in, the situation is amplified from how it would be over the course of a full season, so we need to go for three points.
"We thought having an extra goalscorer on the pitch, an extra attacker close to Macauley would give us a chance.
"To be fair, we had a couple of chances, Joe had a couple of big touches and moments in the box that we weren’t able to take.
"Even in the second half performance, to be fair, I think we probably on another day could have had a goal. We had a couple of good opportunities that we didn’t manage to take.
"In terms of the decisions we tried to be positive and tried to chase the game. Obviously that opened us up a little bit and they had a couple of moments as well and on a really, really bad day you could end up losing the game.
"We didn’t lose, it’s another clean sheet, things to improve and we move on to the next game.”
The clean sheet was the big positive for the Blues, a fifth in a row equalling a club record previously achieved in 2019, 2013 and 1997.
"It doesn’t feel like it at the moment, to be honest, it’s not much consolation because we wanted three points. I’d rather have won 4-3, so it doesn’t feel like much consolation at the moment,” the Northern Irishman reflected.
"Looking at it from a logical point of view, it does an improvement in our game. Anyone who watched the first half could see a team that’s improving and playing at a really, really high level.
"It’s hard for teams to get chances against us when we play as well as we did in the first half with the ball. That’s helping with our clean sheet record, it gives us a chance to win the game.
"Usually on the balance of chances we would have scored a goal tonight, but we didn’t manage to so it ends up with a 0-0 and we don’t take too much satisfaction from that at the minute.”