Until the nascent days of last season, you could make a case that following Ipswich Town home and away over the previous two decades was the bleakest experience in English professional football.
There was no financial apocalypse here, nor a desperate tumble down the tiers. Simply a football club very gradually eroding into a husk of itself, increasingly existing more than it lived. For fans, watching them play was like staring at somebody they used to know.
For 17 years from 2005 onwards, Ipswich only once finished in the top six of a division. Even then, their play-off campaign ended in the worst possible way: a semi-final second leg defeat at the home of their local rivals. If cup competitions could have offered some escape and solace, think on.
Between 2011 and 2022, Ipswich played 37 FA Cup and League Cup games and won only seven of them. The vanquished clubs: Stevenage, Doncaster, Bristol Rovers (twice), Luton, Lincoln and Oldham. That was as good as it got.
The contrasts only made it hurt more. An unfathomably long drought immediately followed the best years Portman Road had known since Bobby Robson’s majesty.
Over a run of 14 years stretching back to before the Premier League era, Ipswich didn’t finish lower than seventh in the second tier. They played five seasons of Premier League football and competed in Europe twice. They beat the Inter of Seedorf, Zanetti, Toldo and Cordoba at home.
Those extended periods of success come laced with risk for supporters. Enjoy a mini-miracle and you can place it into the appropriate context. But when that reaches into consistent achievement, emotional complacency sets in.
The good times don’t feel like the good times when they’re all the time.
Relegation from the Championship caught Ipswich off guard. From no lower than 16th for 16 years on the spin, they finished bottom in 2019. Under the two Pauls – first Hurst then Lambert – Ipswich won five of their 46 league matches. Falling into the third tier for the first time since 1957 should have been the cause of great shock, yet it had been telegraphed for months.
The talent gap between the Championship and League One is fluid, but Ipswich were certainly intending to return post-haste. Instead, they became pinned down by the power of meritocracy: you end up roughly where you deserve to end up. Eleventh, ninth, eleventh – nobody could blame misfortune for that.
Ipswich had the players – there had not been a mass exodus of precocious talent after relegation and they recruited extensively. They did not have vampiric or nefarious owners. They had simply forgotten how to win and so forgotten what winning felt like. Every surge was quickly followed by a pronounced stumble.
Marcus Evans, Ipswich’s then-owner, had once been the future. Taking over from David Sheepshanks in 2007, Evans cleared the debts and rumours of his wealth preceded him. Ipswich fans waved notes at their counterparts during an East Anglian derby.
Evans is certainly no villain. The eventual protests against him and against what had been laid to waste, were reflective only of the extreme frustration that missed opportunity provokes. Poor appointments, managerial missteps and misguided spending are all reasonable charges, but they are hardly unique.
But Evans lost the faith of supporters over Lambert. On New Year’s Day 2020, after relegated Ipswich had taken four points from their last 21 available in League One, Ipswich announced that Lambert had signed a new five-year contract. Supporters were told that Lambert “loves the town and wants to settle down here”, a comment that wholly failed to read the room.
Fans didn’t want consistency; they had seen that slip into decline. They wanted excitement. They wanted a promotion campaign. Lambert was sacked 14 months into his deal at considerable cost.
A month later, US owners Gamechanger 20 completed their purchase of Ipswich Town and ended the Evans era for good. It will not be remembered fondly, for all that was lost and for the manner in which supporters were told to be careful what they wished for when all they wished for was anything else. But Evans did agree to waive over £90m in debt following the takeover. He was a man who took a chance and failed, not a chancer.
American owners of provincial clubs tend to be ambitious to the point of fault, but Gamechanger’s…erm, game changer was appointing Kieran McKenna as the new manager in December 2021. McKenna was a risky call for a new ownership regime, given his age, lack of first-team expertise and lack of work in lower-league football. It has been a masterstroke.
McKenna lost two of his first 18 league games as a first-team manager but had been left too much to do and Ipswich never climbed higher than eighth. Over that first full summer – and aided by the willingness of the owners to invest in new players – McKenna reinforced his vision of how he wanted his teams to play and created a squad he believed could implement it.
Ipswich were the emphatic stylistic exception in League One last season. They averaged more than three per cent possession more than any other team. They preferred to retain the ball in their own half, rather than using direct passes. The ball was then passed into midfield, where quick combinations and a fluidity of shape in the final third was intoxicating to watch. Without the ball, McKenna asked them to press relentlessly.
Ipswich didn’t win the league, but they certainly broke their top-six-finish drought. They were League One’s top scorers (19 clear of any other team) and had its meanest defence. If the frequent draws allowed Plymouth Argyle to pip them to the title, Ipswich lost only four of their 46 games and none after mid-January. Between February and April, when it really clicked, McKenna watched his team win eight straight league games without conceding a goal.
Now McKenna is placing no limit on Ipswich’s ambition and the owners are doing nothing to stop daydreams from escalating. They are sixth favourites to win the Championship season in places, which feels both wildly optimistic and yet evidence of how optimism plays a vital role in maintaining momentum. The greatest danger now is that a bigger club comes calling for a 37-year-old coach who possesses most of the tools they seek.
But forget any thoughts of what might go wrong; they lived that for too long. After 20 years of just-not-quites that became might-never-happens, Ipswich Town is again a club where players want to be and supporters want to watch them. Be careful what you wish for? All they wanted was this: a team, a club and a manager that they would be proud to call theirs.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/RXKW40S
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