Ipswich Town caretaker manager John McGreal has suggested that he is only going to be in the dugout for the Tractor Boys for a couple of games and insisted he will try and get more out of the players.

McGreal’s reign as Ipswich’s caretaker manager did not get off to the best of starts on Tuesday night with the Tractor Boys delivering a poor performance for large parts of the game. Charlton took full advantage of that and managed to see out the game 2-0 and there was a lot of criticism directed at the players at full time from the vociferous away support.

Mark Ashton has already suggested that there are no plans in place for McGreal to be anything other than a caretaker manager at Ipswich, although he did not completely rule out the prospect of that happening given the right circumstances. He did though claim that an external appointment is more likely at this stage.

There will be plenty of things for McGreal to work on now to get Ipswich delivering better performances in their next outing against promotion-chasing Wigan Athletic. This latest setback against Charlton leaves them nine points adrift of the top-six places and means that whoever takes over permanently from Paul Cook has a major job on to get them into the play-offs.

Following the defeat at Charlton, McGreal moved to clarify his role at Ipswich to the East Anglian Daily Times and insisted that he is only going to be in the dugout for a couple of matches. He also insisted that his remit is to get more out of the players than he was able to do in their first game at The Valley.

He said: "I'll try my best. I'm in for a couple of games. We'll see how that goes. My remit is to come in and try and energise the lads, try and get a couple of good results. It hasn't worked tonight but we've got to go again, simple as. In football you win some, you lose some.

"We're on a bit of a low at the moment, but you've got to go again because the games come thick and fast."

The verdict

This is a very difficult one for McGreal because it does seem as though it is going to be tough for him to get more out of Ipswich’s squad following his first game against Charlton. Normally, you would expect some form of managerial bounce, but barring the opening 25 minutes or so it was not to be seen from the Tractor Boys as they were second best throughout the rest of the game.

There is clearly now attention being focused on the players from supporters now that Cook has left and that could make it an even more challenging situation for McGreal to try and solve. Once players lose the support of fans in the stands because of their lack of performances it can be a very difficult atmosphere to work in and try and get results.

McGreal though has now got some time on the training ground to work with the squad ahead of the game against Wigan. You would expect to see a reaction from the players to the Charlton defeat so it will be interesting to see how they perform against once of the best sides in the division at the weekend.