McCarthy: I'd Have Taken Tenth Saturday, 5th Oct 2013 06:02 Having reached the staging post that is the ten-game mark, boss Mick McCarthy is reasonably happy with Town’s current position of 10th in the Championship, five points away from the play-offs and nine clear of the dropzone. “I didn’t know what to expect, but I’d have taken that,” he said. “We were all talking about aiming for the top six. That’s utopia. “What is a surprise is seeing Burnley and Blackpool there. You’d expect Bolton and Leicester and Nottingham Forest and the three teams which came down. We’ll wait and see where we all end up. “The reality is that from where we were in November last year, if we finish a solid eighth or tenth in the league never having looked at relegation, that would be progress. "But we’re wanting better than that. And who knows, if we can stop shipping goals and keep scoring the ones we’ve have. “But I know what will happen, we’ll have a couple of clean sheets and we won’t score and you’ll be asking me the opposite questions.” Last season’s successful survival bid was based on scrapping and battling for points and McCarthy says he’s not taken a particularly different approach this time around. “There has to be a bit of that,” he said. “The brief [last year] was ‘Stay up’. That was my remit. I’d have looked a bit of a chump coming in and playing great football and getting beaten in the first three games and being even more points adrift. It wasn’t about that. “There had to be a bit of that, but I just think the players are playing well and we’ve got some good players.” He says his teams have always tried to play attractive football and that it’s a case of developing that element of style: “We’ve always played with two wingers and played good football when we’ve won the league. “It was always going to be a progression, a progressive thing, try and play the football that I actually like to play. “But I’d settle for playing how we played last year if we got the same results and finished in the top six, that’s how it is. “There’s only one team which has turned us over and that was Derby in the second half and that was bonkers considering what we did in the first half. No other team’s done that to us. “It’s the fear of losing it then. It goes to 4-2 and you start to tighten up, you don’t pass it as well because you don’t want to make mistakes but you’ve got to keep passing it to progress.” While he says his overall approach has been much the same this season, he does feel Town have been better in some aspects of the game: “I didn’t play any other way last year. Who did we have on the pitch, Carlos, Tabby, Luke Hyam, Big G [Guirane N’Daw], two centre forwards, that was my team. We had Stears and Cressy. “And Stears you could say is a bit like Luke Chambers. It wasn’t any different. But I think we’ve a bit more control in games and I think Skusey’s helped in terms of that. “And we’ve tried to get the full-backs further forward, that’s been a bit more attack-minded, certainly.”
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