Bartosz Bialkowski would love to realise his boyhood ambition and play for Poland but his immediate priority is to book a regular place in the Town team.

The 27-year-old, who made his competitive Town debut in last night’s Capital One Cup first round defeat at Crawley, admits that the prospect of playing international football is not uppermost in his mind right now.

Bialkowski said: “It has always been my dream to play for the national team and I have done it at youth level. But we have so many good Polish goalkeepers — Szczesny, Boruc, Kuszczak, Fabianski — so it is hard for me to get into the team.

“I will do everything I can to do it. I need to be number one at Ipswich first before I can start thinking about the national team.

"I’m still improving but I can only improve when I’m playing games. I will just keep working hard and try to push Gerks for the place in the first team.”

Meanwhile, Bialkowski is delighted to have been reunited with his former Southampton colleague David McGoldrick, who marked his return from injury with the second goal in Town’s 2-1 opening-day defeat of Fulham at the weekend.

He added: “David has always been a big talent and he has improved a lot since our time at Southampton. He is a typical goalscorer and he showed it on Saturday.

“He works hard and he has decent shots in both feet. He will be massive for us this season. It’s really important to have him back, fit and scoring, because we need his type of player.

“It was a really good performance by the lads. They worked really hard and put some tremendous effort into the game. We knew it was going to be like that because Fulham are a decent team. We knew we would have to work hard to beat them and we did that.”

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