Manager Kieran McKenna has suggested that Ipswich Town’s promotion charge could benefit from last night’s FA Cup fourth-round exit.
McKenna opted to make 10 changes to his starting line-up for the trip to fellow Championship side Wrexham, who ran out 1-0 winners at the Racecourse Ground courtesy of Josh Windass’ first-half effort.
However, with a busy schedule over the coming weeks, McKenna admitted that having an extra game would have made Ipswich’s bid to return to the Premier League even trickier.
Ipswich Town manager Kieran McKenna. Picture: Barry Goodwin
“You never know. If you go out and you make the changes and you go and win your next league game, there won’t be too many questions,” he said.
“But for me, you look at the schedule and you look at where we would fit in the games for an FA Cup run and, to be honest, it was really hard to see how that wouldn’t be to the detriment of the group.
“Having said that, we’re competitive people and it’s a proud football club and there was a fantastic support here tonight, so we tried to balance those goals with trying to go through in the tie and the players tried and we went to the last second with it.
“And we’re really disappointed for the supporters, especially those who travelled, that we weren’t able to give them the result, but I think with the schedule how it is, having a clear focus now in the league games now, we have two games a week every week up until the middle of April or something like that, so the group’s going to be really important.
“We’ve got minutes into the boys tonight, no injuries and I think that will set us up for the nine games in four weeks that we have coming up than if we hadn’t have given those opportunities.”
Asked about the performance his much-altered team produced, McKenna added: “Of course, we’re disappointed with the result,” McKenna said. “I thought the performance was mixed.
“I thought we started the game well, were the better team at the start of the game, had some good looks at the goal.
“Lost momentum probably about halfway into the first half when they had a run of set plays one after the other and got some good momentum up, and we weren’t able to quite withstand that or wrestle it back for the rest of the first half and they got their goal in that period.
“I thought in the second half we came out strong again and pushed for the equaliser and we pushed right to the end of the game, but it’s not easy to break them down at that stage. They defend their box well and we were close but we weren’t quite able to get over the line.
“I think the general performance across was mixed for different reasons, we were also playing against a good side.
“It was a tight game but I think probably the key period was the spell in the first half where they managed to get on top of the game and were clinical in terms of getting their goal.”
By chance, Ipswich will make the same journey back to Wrexham next weekend for a league fixture.