Sheffield Wednesday promotion rivals ravaged by sickness bug ahead of Portsmouth clash

Ipswich Town face a race against time to patch up their squad ahead of Thursday evening’s trip to Portsmouth – who themselves have designs on improving their sluggish run of form and re-mounting a promotion effort.

The Tractor boys sit two points head of Wednesday in the third tier table heading into the midweek round, which will take the top three teams into the second half of the season. The Owls welcome Port Vale to Hillsborough hoping to leapfrog their rivals into the automatic promotion places.

“We’ve had quite a lot of sickness in the camp," Ipswich boss Kieran McKenna told their in-house media team. “As I said before the [Oxford] game, we had two very unwell.

“After the game, we had seven reporting symptoms. We had three players not able to come to the training ground yesterday.

“It’s just about recovering as many bodies as we can. Of course, we have a training session today [Wednesday] so we’ll see how the boys are from an illness point of view.

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“We’ve got players coming back from injury as well who we have to monitor very carefully to see if they are going to be ready or not.

“In terms of preparation, it’s a short time span and it’s very much going to be a case of waiting to see who is available for Thursday.”

Ipswich sit just behind Wednesday in the League One form table having collected 11 points from their last six matches.