Town boss Kieran McKenna says Saturday’s 2-0 victory at Derby County as the biggest result so far during his time with the Blues, but despite that he still had the players looking at areas they can improve for 40 minutes on Monday.
The win at Pride Park, Town’s 10th in 19 games at the Rams’ home, was set in motion by the brilliant counter-attacking goal started by keeper Christian Walton and finished by Conor Chaplin with the ball in the net only 11 seconds after leaving the Blues’ number one’s hands. George Hirst sealed the win in the second half.
"It was a wonderful goal, certainly one of the most enjoyable goals in my time here,” McKenna said of Chaplin's goal at tonight's Fans' Forum at Portman Road.
"At [Manchester] United we had some fantastic counter-attacking goals in the period I was there and some really good counter-attacking players, but you couldn’t pick too many better than that. A great goal.
"In terms of the all-round performance, there were so many things to enjoy. I think the first 20 minutes, we really took the initiative in the game.
"We spoke about it before the game, that we feel like we’ve taken some steps as a team but probably to go and beat Derby with how important the game was going to be for them and with the crowd, it would probably have to have been our best, our biggest result yet. Of course, every game is three points but in terms of the challenge.
"Without a really good performance, we weren’t going to get the result and I think there were really good things about the performance.
"The way that we took control of the game at the start, the way that we defended at times against a strong team and counter-attacked.
"The way that we found the balance in the second half of staying brave and trying to take the ball and play through the pressure, which we did at times.
"And also, we were away from home and had a lead, so we’d earned the right to defend compact and look to use the tools that we have on the break.
"There were a lot of good things about the performance. On the other hand, the margins are thin. We could have conceded a goal just after half-time, but I think we would have gone again, I think that’s where the group is at the moment. I think we would have gone again, but the margins are fine.
"We probably spent 40 minutes on Monday with the group going through all the things we did wrong, so if they thought they were coming in on Monday for more pats on the back, they didn’t get them.
"We went through everything we can improve because there were a lot of things in the game that we can improve upon and we made sure that we took the time do that.
"I think that’s something that we’ve really done all season and something that has served us well and hopefully will serve us well to the end, whether we win a big game like Saturday and everyone’s delighted or whether we lose a big game like Plymouth away early in the season or whether we have a frustrating draw, we try and stay consistent and look at the performance, look at the things we did well, look at the things we didn’t do well and find areas to continue to improve.
"We’ve tried to stick with that process and be consistent with that every day and I that serves us well in terms of where we are as a group and where we are as a club, which is just trying to get better every day and trust that in the long run that will take us back to where we want to be.”
Derby boss Paul Warne has continued to complain about his side’s disallowed goal just after half-time and McKenna admits that Town might have seen the balance of bad refereeing decisions - of which the Blues have had more than their fair share over the campaign - slightly addressed in their favour with that decision, although felt the corner from which it came oughtn’t to have been awarded in any case.
"Maybe we had one on Saturday,” he reflected. "But on the other hand, and it’s not been said from our point of view, but if you look at the corners, Christian Walton was getting fouled on every corner by the forward [David McGoldrick].
"It was two back-to-back corners that the goal eventual came from and the corner before that one was undoubtedly a free-kick on Christian Walton. He had to palm the ball away under what was a foul and they got another corner then and maybe there wasn’t quite so much contact on the next one.
"I think over the course of that game, I could see why the referee was probably looking for a foul on the goalkeeper at that point because there had been a few of them leading up to that.”
While McKenna backed referees and admitted they have a hard job to do, he still remains irked by the Oxford match, the Blues’ most recent league defeat, in which both managers called for the game to be abandoned due to the heavy fog but referee Bobby Madden told them that if he did so the scoreline would remain as it was, which wasn’t the case but a later PGMOL report claimed wasn’t the case.
"The Oxford game still rankles,” he said. "I won’t go into it because our focus is on the future, but how it happened, the report and what was said after it, I disagree with all elements of it.
"But that’s in the past and we can only control the future and the future, of course, is trying to do as well as we can in the eight remaining games.”