Back on home turf and another three points in the bag.
After four away days Town returned to Portman Road for the first of a trio of crucial Championship games.
First up Swansea. And the convincing 3-0 victory put the team, and the often critical supporters, in a good mood for the upcoming games against rival promotion club Hull City, this coming Tuesday, and relegation threatened Leicester City, on Saturday.
Yesterday’s result cut the gap by three points to second placed Middlesborough who play at Birmingham tomorrow.
Ipswich stay in fourth place in the table but have a game in hand on Boro and have played two fewer than Millwall, who are third.
Man of the match Anis Mehmeti drilled home after just three minutes before Ivan Azon rolled a curling shot into the far corner from an acute angle to double the home side’s advantage late in the first half.
Swansea struggled to produce a response and any chance of a late revival was wiped out when substitute George Hirst steered in the third goal 16 minutes from time.
Ipswich’s second successive league win – and a third in the past six attempts – boosts their top-two prospects as they chase an immediate return to the Premier League.
Swansea thought they had equalised when Gustavo Nunes tapped in from Melker Widell’s low cross only for the Swede to be flagged offside, and with that Ipswich resumed control.
The delighted Town manager Kieran McKenna said in his post match interview that picking up the three points was “hard work” against a “really good footballing side”.
He said: “It was certainly hard work, no doubt about that, but when you go about it the way that we did you make it, you can never say comfortable, but you make it as efficient as it could have been because Swansea are a really different opponent than what we have faced most of the time faced this year.
“They are a really good footballing side, loads of technical players who really, really want to get the ball in play and get the ball on the floor.
“We showed some really good passages of football to play all the way through their press and we broke it really well to go through the pitch and the second half … we had to defend, block the middle of the pitch and limited them well and had the better chances in the second half really to extend the lead and did with the one goal.
“I liked the way we went about it and really recognised what the opponent was and what we needed to do and that’s so important in this league.”
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