SAY what you like about Mick McCarthy’s Town teams but they do have an uncanny knack of pulling a result out of the bag just when they need one.

Whenever you think things are on the slide - both in terms of form and manager-fanbase relations - they grab an outlook-changing victory.

The excellent 3-1 win against Newcastle last season for example, or the gritty 1-0 away success at Derby a couple of months back.

Saturday’s 1-0 vanquishing of perennial pantomime villains Leeds United was another.

Prior to the match some were suggesting the season was over following a run of five games without a win in all competitions which had left them seven points off the play-offs in 12th and dumped out of the FA Cup at the third-round stage once again.

But the Championship being the Championship, one win later that gap has been cut to four points, although with the Blues remaining 12th.

Saturday’s game was memorable for a number of reasons, not least Bersant Celina’s stunning 67th- minute winning goal.

The Kosovan international has followed in the footsteps of the man he effectively replaced, last year’s loanee Tom Lawrence, by staging his own goal of the season competition.

Saturday’s strike will be hard to beat in terms of the goal itself and the context in which it was scored, both within the match and Town’s season.

Despite the Whites having been reduced to ten men for the fifth time in nine games at Portman Road after Eunan O’Kane’s totally unwarranted head-butt on Jonas Knudsen, the Blues weren’t really peppering the Leeds goal with shots, even if they were having most of the ball.

The annual visit by more than 100 Fortuna Dusseldorf supporters ensconced in the Sir Bobby Robson Stand enhanced that atmosphere, as did the decision to give Leeds fans an additional 1,000 seats across the top tier of the Cobbold Stand.

The club will probably consider the move a success given the additional income and noisier ground but equally there were downsides with bottles, broken chairs and a flare thrown down towards Town fans on the lower tier.

I would guess the club will look to repeat the initiative for future games against bigger Championship clubs but perhaps leaving the lower tier empty.

Overall, it was an entertaining and incident-packed game rather than one of quality. Town deserved to win but it perhaps wasn’t as comprehensive a victory as it might have been against ten men.

They never looked like repeating the 4-1 pummelling they received in similar circumstances at Fulham earlier in the month, for example.

Saturday also saw Mick McCarthy confirm the second addition of the transfer window with young French defender Chris Goteni joining from French fifth tier club Saint-Apollinaire.

McCarthy has enjoyed great success with similarly low-profile signings in the past, most notably Michael Kightly, who he signed from Grays Athletic when at Wolves, Tyrone Mings, recruited for Town from Chippenham Town for £10,000 and then sold to AFC Bournemouth for £8 million, and Kieffer Moore, a £20,000 signing from Forest Green a year ago who joined Barnsley for £750,000 earlier this month.

Whether Goteni will repeat that success remains to be seen. Town fans, meanwhile, are hoping for some higher-profile additions before the end of the month, ideally in midfield with Adlène Guedioura, who was linked over the weekend, looking a not unlikely recruit given his lack of involvement at Middlesbrough and having played for McCarthy at Wolves.

At the same time fingers remain crossed that the Blues can keep hold of their key players, most significantly Bartosz Bialkowski, who has been linked with Crystal Palace.

Tommy Smith looks certain to end his decade-plus association with the club to join his former New Zealand manager Anthony Hudson at the Colorado Rapids once another centre-half - probably Brighton’s Connor Goldson - has been brought in.

In last week’s column I suggested Town were going into a run of games where they have a chance to get back into play-off contention or see their season drift to another mid-table finish.

They passed the first of those tests by beating Leeds and face the second at Bolton tomorrow.

The Trotters have had a tough return from League One but appeared to be on the up until last week’s 2-0 defeat at Brentford, which saw them slip back a place to 21st.

An away win would build on last week’s result against Leeds and you wouldn’t bet against McCarthy’s Blues pulling another of those crucial victories out of the bag just when they need one.