Ipswich Town manager Kieran McKenna says tomorrow's trip to Nottingham Forest provides another opportunity to prove their Premier League progress.

The Blues lost their opening two games of the season to Liverpool (2-0 at home) and Manchester City (4-1 away), but put the lessons learnt from those matches into practice when getting positives results against Tottenham (2-1 win away) and Manchester United (1-1 at home) recently.

Tomorrow's game at Forest will be a different type of challenge. They are more physical and direct. There's less spotlight on the game. Ipswich go into it with less of an underdog tag, despite the fact the hosts sit seventh in the table. When all of the above was the case earlier in the season it resulted in flat defeats to West Ham (4-1 away) and Everton (2-0 at home).

"Tottenham and Man United were a certain type of game from a tactical perspective, from a physical perspective, from a mental perspective. This is now a different challenge against a team who play very differently than those teams," said McKenna.

"And there's a different level around the game in terms of the scrutiny on a Man United on Super Sunday as opposed to a Saturday three o’clock away from home.

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“From a mental point of view, it’s about really dialling in. This is Premier League game against a top team who have got much, much, much more experience at this level, have got top individual quality players and have shown this season that they can hurt any team. They can certainly hurt us.

“And then we need to deal with the stylistic differences. Nottingham Forest are very, very good at using Chris Wood as a target man in the build-up and that’s very different than facing Marcus Rashford or even Dominic Solanke. We are going to have to work really hard to try and stop him. It’s not going to be easy but we have a good plan."

The Blues boss added: “Our last two games have had positive results and I think the couple of games before that (4-3 loss at Brentford and 1-1 home draw with Leicester) have been very positive performances where we should have had more points, so we feel like we are in pretty good form.

“But this is a completely different type of game, different challenge, different opponent and we need to step it up again. Come three o’clock on Saturday, it all starts again and we have to fight for a new result."