Ipswich 2-0 Huddersfield (Burns 27′, Hutchinson 48′)
PORTMAN ROAD — You see Simon Hooper blow the final whistle but don’t hear it. Portman Road’s steadily drumming heartbeat is replaced by ambiguous euphoria. The foot soldiers of unbridled joy gush onto their garden of Eden like blood from an gaping wound.
There are more than 100 fluorescent human pylons lining the perimeter, but the hounds of hell could not stop this rapture. The floodgates open and can never be shut again. After 22 years of longing and losing, Ipswich Town have returned to the Premier League.
From Tasmania – where one fan flew in from – to Thetford they came to witness the final flourishes of fate. Hours before the game they were already crammed along Sir Alf Ramsey Way, under flailing wisps of flare smoke which met and danced and fell in love on the morning breeze, leaving behind a duvet of blue pixie dust. Someone even brought a tractor. It smelled of summer and watermelon vape haze and hope and everything, everywhere, was blue. Blue air, blue hair, blue hearts.
Back along the road, they queued for souvenir programmes in their hundreds, terrified of forgetting even a moment of what was to come.
It is days like this, renewals of our footballing vows, that force us to question how important sport really is, whether this can really mean as much as it feels like it means.
Yes, no one had died, but here were 30,000 people truly living and, god, that’s something to celebrate. This may well be worth £125m to Ipswich in the next year alone. These moments and memories are worth infinitely more.
Occasions like this snap us from the hallucinatory tedium of football’s relentless content cycle. We remember why this matters, why we care. For so long Ipswich have only been able to rest on the laurels of their history, now they can soar on the vast wings of the present.
Under the sun’s resplendent shawl, Portman Road was full 15 minutes before kick-off, fans desperate for the catharsis of finally escaping stasis. Thousands more nibbled their nails and tapped their toes in nearby pubs and bars and living rooms, desperate for a ticket but happy just to settle for paradise adjacent. Ed Sheeran, the most famous Tractor Boy of them all, was resigned to anxiously watch from Miami.
And at the heart of this Shangri-La in Suffolk, an unassuming, reserved obsessive paced round his specially-made analysis bunker. He had the greatest reason to be nervous but the greatest responsibility to appear calm. Since leaving Fermanagh at 16 for a football career which never came to pass, this was the crowning moment of a young life defined by setback and sacrifice.
Even an hour and a half after the game, Kieran McKenna was still fizzing about the gradually emptying pitch, pinballing from camera to camera wielded by reverent youths.
He talked about the “monk-like discipline” which has got his side here and explained he hadn’t even booked dinner for Saturday evening, let alone a summer holiday. He had refused to look past 2.30pm until it was here, hugging him and jumping up and down, except for the four different pre-season plans he’s already plotted.
After consecutive promotions which have led to Ipswich earning more points than any other side in English football since 37-year-old McKenna was appointed, process, rinse, repeat will be the plan. It shouldn’t be that easy, but maybe it will.
Centre-back Luke Woolfenden, one of McKenna’s great success stories, conducted his media duties with beer in hand and tears in eyes. When McKenna took his first senior job at Ipswich less than two and a half years ago, this jocular, blue-eyed academy boy was destined for the exit, perennially benched. He may well now represent his boyhood club at Old Trafford and Anfield.
“We’ve just made the impossible happen,” the 25-year-old effuses. “We get body-fat tested more than I’ve ever done, we run more, we work harder in the gym, recovery is massive for us. As a group, it’s the most professional bunch that I’ve been around. When you work that hard, it takes away the nerves. You’re not leaving things to chance.”
Both Woolfenden and McKenna speak about the value of living in the moment, taking nothing for granted, tackling life one day after the other. The players will be in training on Tuesday despite finishing six points clear of the threshold for automatic promotion and just one point behind champions Leicester. None of this happens by chance. Miracles are for those who can’t create magic themselves.
The game itself was something of a non-event, brushing past an already-relegated Huddersfield. Wes Burns scored Ipswich’s first after a smooth move. He held it together amid wild celebration long enough to pull off a viral dance move, before betraying his excitement and diving to the ground to kiss the turf, to worship the gods of football, the legends of Ipswich, the promise of immortality.
And early in the second half, just moments after the tannoy ramped up the tension with Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna”, Chelsea loanee Omari Hutchinson beat Chris Maxwell too easily, but this was a good day to bury a bad mistake. Hutchinson produced a perfect double front-flip and everyone inside Portman Road wished they could have done the same. Hands crept up the back of heads as fans realised this was really happening.
Few will care what comes next for Ipswich for a while, but expect the unexpected. They rise into the Premier League with an effective financial clean slate and have little-to-nothing to do to bring their facilities up to code. They’ve been living in a top-flight world long before they’ve got there.
Eight of the 11 players who started the 6-0 win over Exeter which confirmed their promotion to the Championship last April also started on Saturday. They have recently welcomed a £105m financial injection from selling a 40 per cent stake in the club and already play football which doesn’t require them to dominate the ball.
The last two sides to have managed back-to-back promotions to the Premier League, Norwich in 2011 and Southampton in 2012, both survived comfortably. And if any manager is prepared to take Ipswich into the top flight having spent less than £5m in the past year, it’s McKenna.
Despite his eventual Champions League ambitions, you can tell he thrives as an underdog, which Ipswich have been for the past two seasons despite the overwhelming success. Overachievers are underdogs by definition.
McKenna’s ability to improve players, to mold them to his will and beliefs while inspiring almost religious fervour is a mark of a truly elite manager. He has been linked with moves to Crystal Palace and Brighton, but it feels impossible he could walk away from the brave new world he is still building in Ipswich.
“I love it here,” he said post-match. “I’m so proud to be the manager of this football club, I’ve given so much of myself, and I’m just so focused on enjoying that journey. The speculation has been there for the last two years, to be honest, and I’ve shown loyalty to the club. I’m pleased I’ve stuck with it. There’s some big and exciting steps to come.”
Whatever tools he is provided to tackle the Premier League, have no doubt he will prepare them to weapons-grade standard.
For an Ipswich side in perpetual motion, this is a rare time for reflection. Champagne days like this are for reminiscing and dreaming, halcyon moments which inspire a lifelong love.
Reflect on Jeremy Sarmiento’s 97th-minute winner against Southampton, Hutchinson’s 95th-minute winner against Rotherham and Burns’ Puskas contender against Coventry. Reflect on the past 22 years, on the rebirth of optimism, on all the imaginable and unimaginable possibilities ahead. Reflect on life and love and loss.
Post-match, fans called absent family members and took sun-kissed photos destined for mantelpieces, hugging each other so tight the pitch became one great blob of bouncing ecstasy. Ali Al Hamadi, playing in League Two in January, was hoisted aloft as a Premier League footballer. If a therapist ever asks those in attendance to imagine their happy place, this is where it will be.
“Please remove yourself from the roof of the Cobbold Stand” came the desperate plea from the stadium announcer, attempting to corral the crowds with his best substitute teacher impression and being respected as such.
He agrees these are amazing scenes, truly unprecedented, but could everyone please return to their seat. They don’t. This is their party, and they’ll decide when it’s over. Some time in August seems appropriate. Maybe they never will.
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