Ipswich Town column: 'Only three points at Derby County looks good enough in race for automatic promotion'

On the road again. second-placed Ipswich Town travel to sixth-placed Derby County this weekend in the first of nine absolutely gigantic games to finish shaping up the Sky Bet League One table.

If you had of said six weeks ago when Town were in a real bad run of form and struggling to find a win, that come the start of April they’d be back in with a shout of winning the league, I’m not sure there would have been many who had believed you.

But here we are now and if The Tractor Boys continue on this excellent winning run they seriously do have a proper chance of not just going up automatically, but potentially winning the whole thing.

Now I don’t want to get too carried away and I think we’ll all agree that Ipswich Town’s run-in is a lot ‘harder on paper’ than those around them.

But as we’ve seen with Sheffield Wednesday recently losing to Forest Green Rovers – it can be the games you’re expected to win that cause you the most damage.

So as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, the only team we should be worrying about is ourselves, starting with a tricky trip to Pride Park this Saturday.

Paul Warne’s men have struggled in the last few weeks with no goals scored in their previous two games. So if the form table is anything to go by, then Ipswich Town should be heading up the A14 with seven consecutive clean sheets behind them, six wins and full of belief they can take all three points back to Suffolk.

But as we know in football, form doesn’t guarantee you anything and we’ll need to be right at our very best to win this one, which I’m sure we will be.

So what is a good result? Is a draw away at promotion chasing Derby a decent point? Or do we really need to be taking advantage of their sliding form and come away with maximum points?

Well for me, it’s got to be the latter.

Town have already drawn and thrown away too many points this season and I think we’re now at the stage where we need to be looking to win any game that we play.

After Saturday, it’s Wycombe at home on Good Friday, followed by Cheltenham away on Easter Monday, ahead of back-to-back home games with Charlton Athletic and Port Vale (April 15 & 18) which all look like games Ipswich should be taking maximum points from.

Just imagine if we go and win at Derby what that could do not just for the table, but psychologically, knowing we’ve gone to both 5th and 6th placed Bolton and Derby and won.

It wouldn’t just help our plan to gate-crash the top two, but if we were to fall short, then we could potentially be facing either one of those two sides in the play-offs knowing we’d already beaten them.

Nine games to go and nine of the biggest games not only in Kieran McKenna’s managerial career, but in the Gamechanger era so far.

The last few weeks have shown just how much it can all change and Town need to make sure they’re the ones standing calmly on the ground, whilst those around them ride this topsy-turvy promotion roller-coaster to its conclusion.

Come on The Blues.