Ipswich Town v Swansea City: Kieran McKenna on facing Michael Duff

Following successive 2-2 draws at Birmingham and Rotherham, the high-flying Blues are looking to get back to winning ways in front of another sold-out Portman Road ahead of the third international break of the campaign.

“We've had had Saturday-Tuesday away games in tough conditions, things went against us in both games as well, conceding in early moments, so there are huge positives to take from the way we stuck at it in both," said McKenna, whose side sit second in the Championship table.

“We’re looking forward to being back at home now and playing in front of a full Portman Road in the last game of this block, this will be the sixth game in 18 days, and giving it a real push to try and get a performance."

He continued: “We’ll go out there with really positive intent as we always do. Swansea are an aggressive side, hard running and will try, I think, to press us with a lot of energy.  

“There’s a chance it will come down to the later stages of the game and we may need an impact from our subs again. We’ll need great energy from the stands to help us produce a performance and result."

After seeing Russell Martin lured away by Southampton in the summer, Swansea turned to Michael Duff - a manager Ipswich faced in League One when he was at Barnsley and Cheltenham.

“You have your identity as a manager, but we all adapt to the players at our disposal," said McKenna. "It would probably be unfair to pigeonhole Cheltenham, Barnsley and Swansea all into the same bracket.  

“If you’re looking for common threads, I’m sure Michael would say that he wants his teams, as we all do, to be very hard working, to be very organised and have that as a base to build from. You can see he’s getting that imprint into his Swansea team and that’s helped them to pick up some good results. 

“They’re in pretty good form. In their last 10 games they’ve won five and had a draw. I’m sure Michael feels like he’s starting to get his imprint on the team. They look organised, they’ve got some good players and a lot of Championship experience. We know it’s going to be another tough game."

Meanwhile, the Blues boss was asked if his side were conceding more goals than he would have liked this season or whether that was imply a by-product of the brave brand of football he's deploying.

"We want to be a positive, aggressive team and that means, at times, you have to defend big spaces," he replied. "But we never take any goal that we concede lightly. We never just accept that we’re going to concede. We want to keep a clean sheet in every game.  

“Look, we’ve conceded a few more goals than we would have wanted, but we’ve also scored four more goals than anyone else in the division. You can’t be perfect! Certainly in our situation, as a newly-promoted club, not everything is going to go our way all the time. 

“Before last Saturday we’d conceded two goals in seven away games. Now we’ve conceded twice in successive away games, but if you have a look at those goals it’s an own goal, a wonder strike in stoppage-time, Birmingham’s first goal had a big slice of fortune with it being a mis-hit shot and we got caught cold early on at Rotherham. Sometimes things just happen. 

“You go through spells where it feels like every shot against you goes in, then other times you put eight, nine clean sheets together. You ask yourself ‘what have we done differently?’ and the answer is probably not very much. 

“We’re operating at a higher level against better players and better opposition and we’re still trying to play a very brave style, so we’re going to probably concede more goals than we did in League One. But sometimes football can be pretty random. One day you can not concede having given away a lot of chances and another you can concede goals in games, like we have in the last two, where you don’t feel you’ve given up many chances."