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Can Blues Be Pulled Into A Relegation Dog-Fight?

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There a nine games to go and what looked like a routine end to the season, with little to play for, may have some spice left in it after all, if Town continue to draw games with such regularity.

As I suggested yesterday, it was all very well getting a point a game under the old rules, when manager Mick Mccarthy was a player, because it was half of the max but now a draw is almost as bad as a loss, as the table clearly indicates.

Six draws on the bounce and seven out of our last eight games may keep our unbeaten record alive but it does little to help our current league position, which has seen us draw perilously close to those relegation places.

In the grand scheme of things we should be going nowhere in particular, as we are 17 points off those illusive play-off places and seven points clear of the degradation zone. That said, as the season progresses, we are still going backwards slowly but surely and this should be great cause for concern.

The clubs near the drop continue to win games and this is something we must try to get back into the habit of doing too.

Against Barnsley we showed glimpses of our former selves and David McGoldrick is now back to his best but sadly without the goals to add to his overall performances.

Looking at our forthcoming fixture list, we face three of the struggling sides that are desperate to avoid going down and within the space of two weeks.

On April fools day we face Birmingham City at Portman Road and given manager Gianfranco Zola acceptance that relegation is still a possibility, they too will be desperate for some points and the same applies to Burton Albion and Wigan Athletic, who we also meet later that month.

Now I don’t want to sound like the harbinger of doom and gloom again but we all need a bit of a reality check here.

If teams below us continue to win and we continue to draw – or worse still lose games, then that gap between us and them, will narrow very quickly.

Being content with a draw then becomes no longer a ‘good point all the time’ as McCarthy often indicates.

Frank Weston – Editor of Vital Ipswich

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