Luke Garbutt has urged his Ipswich Town team-mates to forget about Tuesday night’s FA Cup loss to Coventry City and ‘look at the bigger picture’ when they begin a run of five-successive league games this weekend.
The Everton loanee's fifth Ipswich goal did little to mask a poor all-round performance as the Blues crashed out of the cup following the 2-1 loss, meaning the Suffolk side have won just one of their last nine matches inside 90 minutes.
After a disjointed schedule, regularly broken up by cup games and international breaks, second-placed Ipswich begin their run of league games against Bristol Rovers, with Garbutt confident his side can return to their early-season form.
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"We want to go into every game to win, obviously, but we have to look to the bigger picture because we've not had too many bad days," the Everton loanee said.
"The priority is the league and it's a massive game on Saturday in which we want to get back to winning ways. We have to dust ourselves down and be in a positive frame of mind going into the game.
"We have to put Tuesday behind us because we know we can play well and get results. We need to regroup because our mentality is key going into a game where we want to get three points.
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"We'll have a meeting over the next couple of days where we'll talk about a few things and try to eliminate the things we did badly so we go into the game with the right mindset.
"We need to get back to the things we were doing earlier in the season - winning, play well, dominate games, play on the front foot and get the crowd going. I'm absolutely confident we're going to so we need to forget about this game and move on."
After this weekend's game with Rovers, Ipswich face Portsmouth (a), Gillingham (h), Lincoln (a) and Wycombe (a) over the festive period, offering a chance to build real momentum.
"The league's relentless," Garbutt said. "We've had a couple of international breaks and we're starting to catch up now.
"If we can string a few really good results together it's going to push us into a really good position, and we're already in a great one as it is.
"For me personally I'll be saying to the lads that we don't want to take this to heart too much. We obviously don't want to lose football matches or go out of the cup but the league is our priority. We want to get out of this league and play Championship football next season."
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When asked how he and his team-mates feel to be out of the FA Cup, Garbutt replied: "The changing room is very down and that's going to be the case because we didn't play well and didn't really get a foothold in the game at any point.
"The support's been magnificent all season and we have to keep that going and keep the crowd onside which I'm sure we will do.
"We'd have liked to have converted (Alan) Judgey's chance at the end - whether we would have deserved it would have been a different matter.
"Football's a weird game and sometimes you do get things you don't deserve."
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