3/1 To Win
On Saturday, Derby County will face the last team to beat them in the league, but Gary Rowett is expecting a very different challenge when they travel to Portman Road to take on Ipswich Town.
Callum Connolly scored the only goal within five minutes when Mick McCarthy brought the Tractor Boys to Pride Park Stadium at the end of November, and that strike is the last that the Rams conceded as they have since embarked on a run of five successive clean sheets.
Derby knocked on the door all night as their visitors sat deep to protect their lead, but Rowett doesn’t believe that his opposite number, McCarthy, will use the same approach in front of their own fans.
He told RamsTV: “We have to be a little bit more patient and make sure we take our chances when they come, and I’m sure we’ll have to deal with a different approach because I don’t believe they will sit in quite as much as they did away from home.
“They scored an early set piece and it was smash-and-grab for them because we dominated the game and they had very few chances.
“We just couldn’t find the breakthrough but that’s going to happen sometimes, we’ve had games where we’ve conceded more chances and got away with it.”
The game is the third in a run of four games in 10 days over the festive period and after sticking with an unchanged side for the trip to Hull City, Rowett is likely to rotate, although he is wary of upsetting the balance with the side on a good run.
He said: “Ipswich is a difficult place to go, their home form is very good, they’re going well and they can put you under pressure if you don’t play with energy so we will make changes but I’m not sure how many.
“We’ve got a lot of players but at the moment we’re doing a lot of things well and there are some things that you don’t necessarily want to change.
“I’m not necessarily going to replace eight players, but we can make small adjustments and hopefully it won’t affect what we do.”
The Derby boss also provided a fitness update on his squad after Bradley Johnson came off with a knock at the KCOM Stadium, whilst Tom Lawrence made his return from an ankle injury.
He added: “Bradley will probably be touch-and-go for the next two games. It was the landing rather than the impact that tightened his back and hip.
“When it’s like that you’ve got to make sure that it’s cleared up sufficiently to be able to move freely, so he will be a doubt.
“I’ve not heard anything from the others so I presume that Tom Lawrence hasn’t had any ill effects because it looked like he might have suffered a reoccurrence of his ankle injury.
“He took a whack but it looked like he managed to shake it off pretty quickly, and I think that everybody else is okay.”
