MARCUS Stewart, who set the Premiership alight with his 21 goals last season, said it was one of his proudest moments to lead out Ipswich Town team at Crewe.

By Elvin King

MARCUS Stewart, who set the Premiership alight with his 21 goals last season, said it was one of his proudest moments to lead out Ipswich Town team at Crewe.

The 28-year-old took the captain's armband off Matt Holland as Ipswich reached the fourth road of the Worthington Cup.

Holland was left out, along with the other three Ipswich internationals who played for their countries last weekend, and broke a sequence of 223 consecutive matches since he signed for the Tractor Boys from Bournemouth in the summer of 1997.

Burley handed the skipper's role to Stewart and the number 11 was overjoyed.

He said: "It was a tremendous honour to be asked to lead out the team and it is the first time I have captained a team in senior football.

"It was a very proud moment for me and one that I will always savour.

"A couple of the lads mentioned earlier in the day that I might be captain but I did not know for certain until shortly before kick-off that the manager wanted me to take over the role.

"I really enjoyed wearing the armband but once the game started I just got on with my own game and played as best I could. In the first half we played ok without being able to stamp our full authority on the game.

"But after the break we dominated and ended up getting a result that we thoroughly deserved."

Sitting on the touchline with Holland were Jim Magilton, Hermann Hreidarsson and Finidi George.

For Holland it was a particularly poignant moment and the bubbly Republic of Ireland international said that he so badly wanted to play.

Holland said: "It felt very strange watching the team play and I kicked every ball. But I can understand the manager's reasoning.

"If given the choice I would naturally have played having only missed one start since I arrived at Ipswich and that was in the Worthington Cup last season when I came on as substitute at Millwall."

Ipswich gave a full debut to Tommy Miller while Argentinian Sixto Peralta played in his first senior Blues game.

Both did well and combined neatly at times with Ipswich often looking dangerous going forward and carrying the class of a Premiership side but also failing to keep a clean sheet yet again, which must be a cause of worry to manager George Burley.

Apart from Armstrong's back injury there were no fresh injuries for a Town ahead of Saturday's home game with Everton.