Appointing Keane was not a mistake - Clegg

And he admitted that it was not just the manager who needed to do better during the Irishman’s 20 months in charge at Portman Road.

Announcing that Keane’s contract had been amicably terminated by a telephone call from club owner Marcus Evans to Keane on Thursday, Clegg went on:

“I don’t accept that it was the wrong decision to appoint Roy.

“He is disappointed that he has not been able to achieve the high standards and the expectations that he has demanded of himself.

“He is an awesome individual and someone that I have a huge amount of respect for and someone I have grown to like.

“In terms of personality, every manager has their own management style, and having spoken to the players today a lot have benefited from the huge strengths he has brought to this football club.

“The bottom line it is about results and about getting the best out of the players. We all need to do better.

“We all carry a degree of responsibility for this failure and I include myself in this.”

Explaining how the decision to part company with Keane came about, Clegg added: “In the best traditions of this great club, we wanted to give Roy sufficient time to get the team right and to improve the situation.

“However, as he said himself on a number of occasions, the performances on the pitch since November have simply not been good enough.

“While we recognise we are only three points off the relegation zone, we are looking up and not down and we are still looking towards the play-off zone.

“Marcus Evans and I have been discussing the run of form and this has been a fluid and evolving situation for a period of time now and obviously came to a head on Thursday.

“We always said that we were going to review the situation at the half-way mark in the season, and we obviously need to give the new manager an opportunity in the remainder of the transfer window.

“Marcus and I eventually came to the decision that a new manager would have a better opportunity to take us where we wanted to be.”