Assistant manager Stuart Taylor admits it will be good to get back into League One action again at the weekend by which time the Blues will have gone two and a half weeks without a fixture in the competition which is their main concern this season.

Town’s lack of action has seen them drop to second in the table behind Wycombe Wanderers, although with two games in hand on the Chairboys. The Blues are at home to Blackpool on Saturday before the current leaders visit Suffolk for a top-of-the-table clash next Tuesday.

“It’s nice when you look at the league table we’ve still got two games in hand over Wycombe above us, albeit by only three points,” Taylor said.

“I think that we’re desperate for league games to come by and we’ve got two back to back so hopefully it’ll be a good week.

“Getting back into league action, without a shadow of a doubt that’s the daddy, that’s the main one, the one we all want to go and play in and get involved in. Without a doubt we’re looking forward to getting into it.

“Games are going to come thick and fast. We’re coming to the Christmas period which is always busy. So from now to the turn of January, it’s going to be real good times.”

Is Taylor keen for some of the more senior players to get minutes under their belts at Lincoln on Wednesday, many of them having gone so long without a game?

“I don’t think there’s any rustiness creeping in,” he reflected. “The lads have been bang at it at training, the ones that haven’t been playing.

“The ones that are on the bench or not stripped previously are now taking part in games, so everybody is around about level pegging of what we’re looking to do and ideally it would be great to get through the season having success, which is obviously the most important thing, while keeping players fresh and keeping players hungry with competition for places.

“What we don’t want is to be going into a game where someone hasn’t played and there’s maybe six, seven or eight players that haven’t played for six weeks — that’s the worst-case scenario. And that would be bad management if we were going into that.

“We want to keep people fresh and we want to keep people hungry but also have game time under their belts so they are going into games and they’re match fit.”

Regarding the two-and-a-half-week gap between the Rochdale and Blackpool matches, he added: “They’re professional footballers. They can handle that no problem. The intensity of training every day shows there are no issues at all if players have been out for two weeks.”

Taylor was pointed to the Blues’ woeful record immediately after international breaks with Town now having gone 21 games without a win following such a hiatus since they beat Millwall 2-0 in September 2014.

“There are loads of different factors you can take into it, that’s why I don’t really bother with it,” he said when asked how he thought that record might have come about. “Stats are stats, you take out of them what you think’s right.

“Since we’ve been in this season we have changed different things in terms of how we come back from breaks.

“Again we’ve done something different, so let’s look forward to Saturday and hopefully we’ll have a different response to how we’ve come from international breaks.”

Meanwhile, Taylor was pleased to see both skipper Luke Chambers and right-back Kane Vincent-Young named in the Who Scored?’s League One team of the season so far.

“We look for captains at the football club, and you look for leaders,” Taylor said of Chambers.

“And I think we’ve got quite a few in there, but certainly he’s been at the club for quite a while now and he knows the role at the football club, and he knows the expectancy level at the football club.

“He takes it on board and it’s water off a duck’s back for him now. He just strolls through every day and he leads the lads every day at training, and again he’s great with the younger ones. He’ll continue to keep doing that, and he’ll keep churning the games out.”

Photo: TWTD

Suffolkboy added 18:30 - Nov 18 , Exceptionally good to see public appreciation of LC and his contribution ,especially as Skipper ! We really do have a management team who sing confidently from the sane hymn sheet : how very lucky we are ,and let's not forget the quiet but effective contribution made by ME ! COYB
3

Ipswich Town Polls