Captain Luke Chambers has admitted he and his team-mates must banish all memories of last season’s collapse as they look to recover from their first defeat of the new campaign.
The Blues lost their unbeaten record with a 4-1 loss to Doncaster on Tuesday night, exactly a year on from their first defeat of a 2019/20 season which saw Town slide from top spot to 11th before the campaign was curtailed.
Chambers and the rest of the Ipswich squad will be looking to react well when they take on Lincoln this weekend, with the skipper keen to draw a line under both the Doncaster loss and last season’s disappointments.
“There’s those old cliches of looking at your mistakes and looking to bounce back, which is what we’ll be looking to do at the first opportunity this weekend,” Chambers said.
“I think the goals at Doncaster were very much avoidable and we had too many players who weren’t at the levels we’ve set over the last couple of weeks, which can happen.
“You look at Hull, top of the league, who lost 4-1 at Fleetwood and if you’re not on your game, 1-11, you’re not going to win games. We’ve set high standards over the first few weeks and we’ve let ourselves down a bit.
“We’ve had an encouraging start but in the back of our minds you’ll always be thinking about what happened last season and we need to eradicate that, beat a top six side in the division and do that quickly.
“You have to look at the results and all you can do is look at it for the 24 hours after and then react.
“That’s our job now.”
Meanwhile, manager Paul Lambert has praised Luke Chambers’ professionalism after the skipper broke into the club’s top 10 all-time league appearance-makers at Doncaster on Tuesday night.
“You can probably go back through Luke’s career to when it started and the way he has looked after himself I think’s the biggest compliment I can give him,” Lambert said.
MORE: Chambers moves into Town’s top 10 alongside heroes and legends... but how high can the skipper go?
“When you start professional football when you’re 15, 16, 17 and you stay in the game for nearly 20 years and putting your body through that every single week, training every day, playing every Saturday, the longevity of it is incredible.
“I was fortunate I did it myself. If you look after yourself and you do the right things, then you tend to find it repays you and he’s got the rewards for that in playing that number of games. To get in the top 10 at this club is a great achievement.”
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here