Ask Town goalkeeper Christian Walton where he wants to be in a year’s time and he will confidently tell you that he believes he will be on the brink of promotion from League One to the Championship.
He’s not alone in the Blues’ camp, with many players confident their form under new manager Kieran McKenna — just three defeats in 19 league games since he took charge in December last year — can continue into the 2022/23 campaign.
Walton, 26, initially arrived on loan from Brighton shortly after the start of this season and became permanent in the January transfer window, since which he has kept a remarkable 12 clean sheets in his 18 league games as Town went in pursuit of a play-off place.
Sadly, that target looks to be beyond McKenna and his players after a points haul of just six from a possible 15 in their last five outings, although Walton is adamant that Town will be among the frontrunners for promotion next term.
The keeper, who hails from the picturesque north Cornwall town of Wadebridge, was asked how confident he was that Town can be sitting pretty near the League One summit in 12 months’ times, and he replied: "I’m 100 per cent confident. I would never have signed for Ipswich if I didn’t believe the club had the necessary ambition and players of sufficient quality.
"I want to be in a position a year from now where we’re going to win promotion back to the Championship.
"Ideally, I want to be sat in first place, points clear at the top of the league. That’s my ambition and I am sure it’s the same with everyone else in the squad and the staff.
"It’s not going to be easy and it’s going to need a lot of hard work and a good pre-season, while also ending the season well and being a consistent team all the way through.
"Every team has blips along the way — a drop in form or whatever it might be — but we will need to be able to overcome that sort of things and be consistent throughout the season, which I believe we can do.”
Walton’s words will be music to the ears of supporters currently disappointed that Town’s play-off challenge looks to be over as they remain in ninth place, the position they have occupied for the last 15 games, due in the main to the consistency of those teams above them in the table who have successfully protected the leads they established during the first half of the season.
The keeper added: "We’ve done everything we could to get into the play-offs but if you look at the league table it looks as if we’ve just fallen short. It’s been a really big effort from everyone since the new year.
"We’ve had some really pleasing performances and some great results alongside a few performances that weren’t so pleasing and, to be fair, some results that obviously weren’t great.
"We’ve shown a new style of football and taken on everything that the new manager has asked of us but at the end of the day we’ve come up short and that’s obviously disappointing for us, the club and the supporters.
"We will definitely be doing all we can to put on good performances through to the end of the season and when we come back for pre-season training we will be ready to try and push on that bit further in the new season.
"Why has our play-off push closed down in recent weeks? Well, apart from the fact that we have not picked up as many points as we would have liked, the teams above us have also been on good runs and they haven’t slipped up.
"I don’t know for sure but it must be some sort of record points tally that you need to make the play-offs this year.
"In any other season, I think if we were on the same points tally, we would comfortably be in the play-offs, and that’s in the Championship as well as League Two.
"It just shows the quality and the standard of this division. If you look at the top 10 teams in this league, I believe they are capable of playing in the Championship.
"I don’t think it’s a case of the wheels coming off in terms of our challenge to make the top six, it’s just that performances haven’t been as good as we would have liked and we just have to keep going now for the next four games to end the season in a positive fashion.”
A big part of the reason why Town have seen valuable points slip away has been a lack of goals. For example, they have only found the net three times in their last five games, a period in which they have seen the gap between them and the top six grow bigger.
Walton said: "It is difficult to score goals in any league. It is never a given and you have to work very hard for your opportunities, especially when you come up against teams that just literally want to hold out and just defend against us.
"On Saturday they had four defenders across the width of the goal and that’s probably why Shrewsbury actually have a good clean sheet record this season.
"It’s not easy to break teams down. We have quality within our team — everyone has seen that this year — but sometimes there is a bit of a goal drought or whatever you would like to call it.
"I don’t think it’s due to a lack of quality in the squad, it’s just one of those things where we haven’t been able to break teams down as well as we would have liked.”