IPSWICH Town have finished ninth in the list of average attendances in last season’s Championship.

The Blues’ 23 home league games last season saw more than 450,000 come through the turnstiles with an average crowd at Portman Road of 19,614.

This was more than 2,000 over the league average but still fell well short of table-toppers Leeds United (average crowd 27,299), Derby County (26,022) and Norwich City (25,386).

Even Sheffield United, who were relegated to League One, enjoyed better crowds than Ipswich although champions QPR were 14th in the list.

Town’s biggest crowd of the season was 29,258 for the 5-1 hammering by Norwich, while just 16,728 saw December’s farcical 3-0 win against Leicester City in a match dominated by heavy snow.

Crowds at matches in the npower Football League topped the 16-million mark for the seventh consecutive season despite a six-per-cent decrease on the 50-year high recorded 12 months ago.

Championship matches were watched by more than nine-and-a-half million fans with crowds falling by three-per-cent to an average of 17,389 per match.