Kasey McAteer scored his first Ipswich Town goal as the Tractor Boys came from behind to beat Birmingham City and climb to second in the Championship.<\/p>\n
Birmingham felt they should have had at least a point, denied an equaliser when referee Adam Herczeg wrongly ruled the ball crossed the by-line before going in off Dara O’Shea.<\/p>\n
Carlos Vicente opened the scoring for Birmingham, seconds after McAteer had missed a sitter, and Ben Johnson levelled for Ipswich.<\/p>\n
McAteer put Ipswich ahead just before half-time as Kieran McKenna’s side extended their unbeaten run to eight games, while out-of-form Birmingham have lost six of their past eight matches to see their promotion hopes disappear.<\/p>\n
Ipswich were hanging on in the second half and face a massive East Anglian derby at Carrow Road on Saturday against in-form Norwich.<\/p>\n
McAteer fired over before he missed a great chance when he touched the ball past Phil Neumann, one of seven Birmingham changes, and shot weakly at Blues goalkeeper James Beadle.<\/p>\n
Birmingham made McAteer pay for that miss when they went down the other end to open the scoring after 32 minutes through Vicente’s second goal for the Blues.<\/p>\n
O’Shea could only touch Jay Stansfield’s left-wing cross onto Vicente and the Spaniard finished into the far bottom corner.<\/p>\n
Ipswich levelled on 41 minutes when Johnson shot home his first Championship goal of the season from fellow full-back Darnell Furlong’s cross, despite Neumann’s forlorn efforts to keep the ball out.<\/p>\n
McAteer must have been hugely relieved to give Ipswich the lead on 45 minutes when George Hirst played him in and the former Leicester midfielder slotted home his first Town goal on his 24th appearance.<\/p>\n
Birmingham were denied an equaliser on 70 minutes when Herczeg controversially ruled Ibrahim Osman’s ball had gone out of play before it went in off O’Shea, even though television replays provided evidence to the contrary.<\/p>\n
The Blues, transformed from Good Friday’s anaemic defeat by Blackburn, pushed Ipswich hard and Town goalkeeper Christian Walton did well to save Osman’s right-foot shot late on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kasey McAteer scored his first Ipswich Town goal as the Tractor Boys came from behind to beat Birmingham…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-589696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}