Rotherham United boss Leam Richardson felt “the good, the bad and the ugly” of his bottom-of-the-table Millers side were on display as they fell to a last-gasp 4-3 defeat to the Blues at Portman Road.
The South Yorkshiremen thought they’d rescued a valuable point when Cafu netted a 94th-minute penalty to make the score 3-3, but Omari Hutchinson drove home a winner for the Blues only a minute later to move Town up to third, behind second-placed Leeds on goal difference alone.
"Disappointed, I think tonight you saw the good, the bad and the ugly of what we are and why we’re in the position we’re in at the minute,” Richardson, who worked as former Town boss Paul Cook’s assistant at a number of clubs, said afterwards.
"Disappointed for the players, I thought we worked terrifically hard. I thought we started the game very well.
"We had a crazy 10 minutes, for some reason we took a backward step, the first [Ipswich] goal hurt us and we never really recovered from it, we were like a dazed boxer.
"But then after that, I thought probably for the last hour we probably deserved something from the game.
"I don’t think many teams come here and dominate all stats, score three goals and not win the game, so disappointed for the players.”
The Millers remain 14 points from safety having taken 19 points from 33 games with Richardson having taken charge in early December following the sacking of Matty Taylor.
"When I came into the situation that we’re in, I knew the challenge, knew exactly what we were, what we had and we want to just give a good account of ourselves every time,” he reflected.
"It would be easier to give up. Everybody’s got an opinion, everybody lives in a world where everybody can criticise certain things at certain moments, and certainly after games.
"But I don’t think anybody should really give us our fate, we should take our fate in our own hands.
"No matter what points we are at or where we are, we want to evolve as a football club. There’s a lot of work that needs to be going on off the pitch to sustain and challenge clubs like Ipswich.”
Richardson admitted he was thinking about winning the match rather than losing it when Cafu dinked his Panenka penalty down the middle of Vaclav Hladky’s goal.
"We spoke about it straight away before the penalty, I felt like we could try and win the game rather than sit [back for the point],” he continued.
"I don’t think there’s any need to sit on our heels because we saw what that gave us in the first half.
"We go forward and then I think we had a really good opportunity to go and win the game and had a couple of [moments of poor] decision-making at the time and obviously they go up the other end and score a poor goal from our [perspective]. All four goals were poor, they all can be avoided.
"A great game for the neutral, but I don’t think anybody saw Ipswich going to win the game. I think they would have seen Rotherham go on and win the game. But where we’re at at the minute, it’s a tough one to take for the players.”
Richardson says his side’s display was typical of their recent form even if results continue to go against them.
"A lot of the performances since I’ve been in the building have been very similar and especially of late,” he said.
"Watford, Hull, Ipswich, we’ve been up in all the possession stats, crosses, shots etc, but the main stat that counts we’ve found ourselves on the wrong side of, which is tough for them.
"They were on the floor when I came in and I’m trying to lift them off the floor constantly and we’ve got 13 real big games for ourselves.
"And if we start where we left off this evening on Saturday [at QPR], we’ll look for a positive result.”