Ipswich Town boss Kieran McKenna details automatic promotion advantage amid Leeds United race

Ipswich Town boss Kiernan McKenna believes Ipswich Town have an advantage over Leeds United in their bid to land automatic promotion. The Tractor Boys are currently behind the Whites on goal difference but they crucially have a game in hand against Coventry City on Tuesday night.

Ipswich know that four points from their last two games will guarantee their long-awaited return to the Premier League, keeping in mind that they face already relegated - for all intensive purposes - Huddersfield Town at home on the final day. The Tractor Boys haven’t competed at the top of the Championship for some time, but their manager McKenna is confident that experience from last season, when they won an automatic promotion race in League One, will help his side as they prepare for these two defining fixtures.

“There are lots of parallels you can take, to be honest, in the season, in the points, in the two aways before we go back home, all of those things,” he said. “The reality is that the games are harder. Last year was hard but these games are harder, so I’m not sure we’re going to have too many 3-0s or 6-0s.

“But so many of the group have been through this experience with a big three-game week to try and achieve a big goal and they’ve handled it really well before and I think they’re handling it really well at the moment. It doesn’t mean that the games are going to be easier or that we’re going to walk any games but it means we’ll try and keep performing as we have been and as we want to and I don’t think we were far away from that on Friday night.”

Asked if last season’s experience has helped his team, McKenna added: “I think it has. I can say from what I see, I feel around the group, from what I’m seeing on the pitch, I don’t see us playing with tension, which is really important at this stage of the season. I see us playing with bravery, with confidence, with great intensity still and that’s really important. We’re going to get the points that we get at the end of the season. We’ve already got 90, we can’t worry about any other teams, we can just, as we said we would do, go absolutely all in for 46 games and see where we’re at in the end.”

Ipswich finished last season with 98 points, outrunning a Sheffield Wednesday side with as many as 96 points. They could reach 96 points this season, while Leeds can reach 93.