Town boss Kieran McKenna admits he and his staff have some planning to do ahead of a final month of the season which will see them play eight games in 27 days, five away from home, following the postponement of the Good Friday match at Southampton due to the Saints’ progress in the FA Cup.
The Hampshire side won 1-0 at Fulham yesterday to go through to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup with ties to be played over the Easter weekend, meaning the Blues will not make the planned trip to St Mary’s.
That game, along with the twice-postponed visit to Portsmouth, will both now have to be played in April in the only unfilled midweek slots, 14th/15th between the trip to Norwich and home game with Middlesbrough and 28th/29th following the away match at West Brom and the final fixture of the campaign at home to QPR.
"The FA Cup one, it is what it is,” McKenna reflected. "Perhaps there is something which could be done differently for the Championship clubs who progress in that cup because it is a big challenge for Southampton now, but also for the teams who are playing against them, certainly us who have a game to rearrange.
"The only rearrangement which still annoys me is the Portsmouth one and I you know why.
"But other than that, it’s going to be, hopefully, a really exciting end to the season, we’re going to have a lot of games, we’re going to have tough games, but some brilliant games in there to look forward to.
"That’s all to come, all we can control at the moment is the next game and we have to keep performing well and picking up results to make sure it is an end to the season with a lot on it.
"If we can get to that point and we’re still fighting for our goals and if we have to go and win back-to-back and back-to-back games in quick succession away from home, then that’s a great challenge for us.
"But at the moment we just have to control what’s in front of us and if we do that, then we could set up a really exciting end to the season.”
Asked whether he and his staff have to start planning for the busy final month now with their player selection, McKenna added: "I think you plan for it all season, to be honest. Sometimes when you’re rotating the team or giving people opportunities over the season or earlier in the season, it’s because you know that there are going to be periods where everyone’s going to be needed and different people are going to step up. I think that’s part of the reason, that’s my belief anyway.
"Very rarely we’ll just go at the first half of the season, the first three-quarters of the season picking the same XI all year because you know that come the crunch, people are going to have to step up and the more that they’ve been involved in the season, fit, motivated and engaged, the better possibilities that gives you when it comes to the crunch and very often the games come thick and fast, and they’re all vitally important.
"We have a bit of planning to do, to be honest, we’ll have to look at the international break and see how we utilise that as best as possible with the fact that we’re not going to be playing Southampton on Good Friday.
"We’ll have a look at how we use that period as well as we can, knowing we’re going to have a longer break and then a super-busy run.
"But the biggest focus is just on Stoke, we’ve got a little bit of time now to sort those things out and certainly going through to Sheffield Wednesday [on Saturday].
"Another two away games back-to-back, another midweek game, it just has to be full throttle to them and then maybe the early part of next week we’ll get a chance to lay out some real plans for how to use the international break and how we’ll try and taper and peak coming into that last three and a half weeks of games.”
One minor positive is that the Blues won’t come out of the international break straight into a Friday match, which is never ideal.
"No,” McKenna continued. "So we’ll take every silver lining we can.”