Derby v Ipswich: MICK McCarthy admits that his side ‘burgled’ their 1-0 victory at Derby County.

Blues skipper Carlos Edwards drove forward from the halfway line and unleashed a superb winner deep into stoppage-time, but it was Derby – who hit the post through Conor Sammon, saw a Jamie Ward penalty saved by Scott Loach and had a tight offside decision deny Chris Martin a goal – who were the better side.

“We’ve burgled it,” admitted Town boss McCarthy. “I heard the sirens coming and thought ‘shut the door, the police are coming, there’s a robbery going on’!

“There you go, that’s the league. It’s scrappy, it’s not pretty every week, especially at this end of the season. Sometimes you need a bit of quality and we got that through Carlos.

“Did we deserve the points? No, they were better than us. They missed a penalty – or we saved a penalty – whichever way you want to look at it.

“We’ve had to stick at it because we’ve not played particularly well. And we had that bit of quality at the end with a great strike. Carlos is 34 and he produces that after 93 minutes.”

He added: “Derby played well at times. They were certainly the better team in the game. We always manage to fight our corner, but we didn’t play particularly well. We got lucky today.

“Being in the position we are in doesn’t help.

“I’m not bothered how we played. The history books will say we came here and got three points.”

Derby boss Nigel Clough said: “Mick saying that is no consolation to me at all. It’s a bit of frustration and anger because we’ve lost a game that we didn’t deserve to.

“What I’ve been trying to instill in the players is that, come the 93rd minute, as much as we’d like to win the game, don’t lose it. Take the nil-nil, take the clean sheet and everyone says ‘well played you should have won’.

“I’m so disappointed. It would have been 10 points out of four games, another place up the league and instead we give the ball away in midfield when we shouldn’t and we concede from it.”

He added: “We might have had a penalty at the end. It was certainly a foul – I don’t know if it was in or outside (the box). We know that the goal that was disallowed wasn’t offside.

“We’ve missed four consecutive penalties now (two by Conor Sammon and two by Jamie Ward) so we’ll have to change our taker I think.

“Score that and I think we’d have gone on to win the game comfortably. It really does stick in your craw when you lose these sort of games. I’ve seen and played in so many of these games over the years where a team barely has a shot at goal and then sticks one in the top corner in the 93rd minute.”

– See Monday’s EADT and Ipswich Star for match analysis, comment and more reaction.