BLACKBURN Rovers boss Owen Coyle’s called his struggling side’s drab 0-0 draw at home to Ipswich Town a ‘fair result’ but his opposite number disagreed.

Rovers’ run without a win and a goal stretched to three games after they failed to test Bartosz Bialkowski in what was a woeful affair between two shot-shy and out-of-form teams.

Ipswich have now gone five winless matches since scoring but that barren sequence would have ended had it not been for poor finishing and good goalkeeping.

Jason Steele’s saves helped second-from-bottom Rovers keep their first clean sheet of the campaign and Coyle, who lost Gordon Greer and Corry Evans to injury, said: “It was a very hard fought Championship game, as we expected.

"We started the first 15 minutes well but I felt thereafter we probably got caught up in Ipswich’s way of playing.

“Did we create clear-cut chances? No. That was my disappointment. We got to the final third in the wide areas many times. Normally we’ve got players that can produce a little bit of a creativity but we didn’t do that.

“But that’s our first clean sheet of the season, which we’ve been craving for a long time, and they showed real character and resilience to stand up and deal with a lot of aerial balls.

“I think a draw was probably fair over the course of the game because there weren’t too many clear-cut chances.

"Could we do better in terms of being more aggressive in terms of our early passing and being quicker and sharper? Absolutely.

“But they stood up to a real test in terms of defending your box and I do believe that we’d have lost that game in the first three weeks of the season.”

The draw ended Ipswich’s run of five straight defeats at Ewood Park and their manager Mick McCarthy said: “The way we’ve been at Blackburn for the last four visits, we’ve been awful so I would have taken anything from Blackburn.

“We needed a performance. I thought I got that, I thought our fans got that.

“I’m disappointed, I thought we should have won the game, to be honest with you. Jason Steele got the man of the match and probably deserved it.

“Could we have been better, more clinical? I don’t know. But I don’t know what they’ve really contributed in the second half, certainly.

“I thought we were the better team and if any team was going to win it, it was going to be us.”