Football is a food chain. If we take off our rose-tinted spectacles and look back through the history books, you soon realise that it always has been, ever since the dawn of the professional game. It is the law of the jungle. Take the legendary Paul Mariner as an example. Chorley fans must have been gutted when they lost their young star striker to Plymouth Argyle in 1973. When I lived in Devon in the 1990s, older fans at Home Park were still bemoaning the day Ipswich came calling in 1976 and they lost one of their cult figures. Despite the argument that when Town sold him to Arsenal in 1984 he had reached the veteran stage of his career, he was still representing England and it was a big loss, by no means the final one, as Bobby Robson’s star-studded side was slowly dismantled. Chorley-Plymouth-Ipswich-Arsenal…a footballing food chain.
We need to remind ourselves that each time we lose a top player, we will be hunting down a replacement equally loved by his current club. As Paul Hurst assembled an initial squad in which seven of the new signings had been bought from lower league clubs, I do not suppose that any Town fan spared a thought for the Peterborough fans who will no longer get to see Gwion Edwards weaving his magic on the wing, or Shrewsbury supporters, stripped of two of their prize assets. All we care about is whether these incoming players will be able to step up to the next level. It is dog-eat-dog out there and we tend to have tunnel vision.
Already there are rumblings about unknown players being signed up. In terms of quantity, I can understand the concern. But in terms of quality? Maybe we have short memories. In recent years, some of the best Town players have been plucked from further down the football pyramid. Give me a Bialkowski, Cresswell, or Mings, over a higher-profile Tamás Priskin or Lee Martin any day. Delve further back and who knew what to expect from the likes of Holland and Walters? There is always a gamble, of course. However, you are more likely to be getting someone hungry to prove himself, rather than an established player in their comfort zone. Hurst’s track record of reigniting playing careers is mightily impressive. He seems to thrive on taking players who started life at big clubs but were discarded and subsequently had to make their way back up the football ladder. The reality with ITFC, as with most EFL clubs is that, as Hurst has wryly observed, ‘We have to shop in a certain market.’ Drawing on his metaphor, Town are shopping in Tesco rather than Waitrose. It could be worse.
The financial food chain is a completely logical reality in the money-mad professional football world. Where I have a problem is the stockpiling of talented young players by clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea. As Martin Calladine – author of The Ugly Game – has pointed out, FFP rules ironically encourage the big clubs to ‘farm’ young talent in vast academies. The full cost of youth development does not count against them in terms of FFP limits, and yet the income from any sales of these development players helps their FFP. This paradox has Calladine wondering whether the PL academies are genuinely there to develop future first team players, or whether they have simply become ‘profit centres’.
What the stockpiling does do is upset the food chain. Recently, the Elite Player Performance Plan system allowed Man City to buy Ipswich’s highly-rated England Youth International Ben Knight. By all accounts, he is one of the most talented teenagers the club has ever produced, yet we will probably never get the chance to see him at Portman Road. Will he make it at City? I hope so, yet there is a fair chance that he will not. After all, their side is not exactly brimming with ex-academy players.
Town’s former Head of Academy Recruitment, Steve McGavin, talked a couple of years ago about ‘mind-blowing’ financial packages being offered by top clubs, even to Under 9 players. Under nines! He went on to state:
‘Unfortunately, with the Premier League, we have created a monster. It’s like a runaway train that no-one knows how to stop. The money at the top end, as we all know, is huge and it’s filtered down into the Premier League academies.’ (EADT, 02/07/2018)
Personally, I do not blame talented kids and their parents for making these moves: the money, the prestige and the facilities on offer… However, we all know what happens in the natural world when the food chain is upset. This ugly, parasitical side to youth football cannot end happily. In addition, there is a more sinister side to it. A recent article in a national newspaper tells the disturbing story of a promising young Sheffield Wednesday teenager who Leicester City tried to sign, unsuccessfully. He has now joined a lower division Belgian club instead. One which happens to be run by the owners of… Leicester City. The Belgian club only had to pay a fraction of the compensation which an English club would have. The journalist inferred that it would not be a surprise if the youngster ends up at Leicester one day. A perfectly legal loophole. No wonder Calladine refers to football as the Ugly Game.
I asked Accrington Stanley’s wonderfully frank owner Andy Holt what he made of the current situation, with top clubs creaming off young talent and then stockpiling these kids. (Calladine notes that, in 2016, Chelsea had a whopping seventy-two ‘development’ players outside their first team squad.) Holt suggested that clubs like Chelsea should be forced to free players they do not use themselves: ‘They’d go for free. Clubs taking them would guarantee playing time. Use them, or let them go to clubs that will. Really simple, player career counts more than club success. Otherwise, there’s a lost generation of players looming.’ (Twitter, 12/08/2018)
I love Holt’s ‘use them or lose them’ idea, however unworkable it might be in reality. Perhaps I am simply yearning for a return to a simpler age, the latter part of the Robson era when the owner and manager were able to nurture and then unleash young talent. Unhindered by the lurking shadow of EPPP and Category 1 status academies. Of course, back then ITFC were a top side, if not a big club. We were high up the order of command. However, the football food chain itself has changed. Today, it is a distinct possibility that the likes of George Burley, John Wark, Alan Brazil and Eric Gates would never have had the opportunity to impress Portman Road crowds as raw teenagers. (Burley marked George Best on his Town debut at Old Trafford as a seventeen-year-old.) Maybe, like Ben Knight, they would have been poached long before then and subsequently sealed away in monster-sized academies in London or the North West. Maybe their careers would never have developed. I find myself returning to Holt’s haunting warning about a Lost Generation. No wonder that Martin Calladine titled his article, ‘Save the Children’. Maybe those young players in academies such as Town’s should be warned to be wary of monsters bearing gifts.
© Rodney Marshall | Follow on twitter - @RodneyMarshall1
Right, forgive the tone of this, but seriously, how can anyone with half a brain say we have problems after two games… yes, you read that right, TWO GAMES!
I’ve been to enough games home and away over the 35 years I have been supporting Town to know that not all of our fans are the sharpest tools, or have the greatest attention to detail (I had to talk a chap through who was who all Blackburn) but one thing that is (or was) in the DNA of all Town fans was ‘patience’.
The Cobbold’s had bags of it, Sheepy had more than enough, Mr. Evans certainly does and more importantly, the fans have it, case in point we pretty much 'tolerated’ Mick McCarthy’s brand to football for 2 years before gently voting with our feet until something was done…Mr. Evans, well actually Mick obliged.
So how is it, when we’ve got what the majority, if not all of us we wanted (I mean did we really want Schteve McClaren or the Cowley brothers here?) I am forced to read Tweets that to the layperson are suggesting the club is playing worse football than in the latter stages of the Mick era, the squad is chock full of the likes of Coke, Douglas and Best to name 3 (there are plenty more) and the squad is too inexperienced etc.
We are 2 games in, one was a draw with 4 new faces, the other a defeat, with effectively 8 new faces where we bossed most of the game, with stats of 63% possession, 15 shots and 12 corners, you tell me when we last did that away from home….I’ll wait!
My favourite Tweet on Saturday evening was 'is Paul Hurst the right man?’ Seriously, talk about lack of patience, in fact, that is just pure stupidity!!
I am not naive that come October if we are losing games, then we maybe need to worry, ever so slightly but are you guys (negative Tweeters/Posters) so clueless that you cannot see the many positives in the recent displays?
To put this simply, in a matter of weeks, actually, scrap that days, Paul Hurst has got a brand new group of hungry, young athletic players, to play a brand of football we saw 3-4 times under Mick in his 5 years, which all of us, including the 'negatives’, were lauding at the time?
The ball is on the floor, we take care of the ball better, we are far more aggressive from the off, home and away, we have actual wingers, certainly one in Edwards and to be fair, we look pretty solid at the back considering that 3 of those lads have never played as a back 4 together and to add to that we have players, some just coming back that we were clamouring for last season in Huws and Bishop, not to mention Dozzell and then we have Downs and Morris, the latter looking particularly useful in his 7 or so minutes v Blackburn.
You have to remember we are notoriously slow starters, under both Burley and Royle we regularly only got going in October, sometimes later…does anyone remember the 2-0 reverse versus Stockport at home in 1997?
I guess, all I am saying is let’s be proper Town fans, show some patience, back the boys and the manager as I predict good things, it might that we this in October, if that is the case, so be it.
COYB.
Follow on twitter - @waynejoshua1976
By a quirk of fate, as I sat down to write this article my attention was drawn to a piece published on line by lifelong Norwich City fan Gary Gowers: Too much time spent dwelling on events south of the border? Or a natural by-product of a local rivalry? The title might be a tortuous one, but the article is excellent, honest and well-balanced. It highlights the obsession which some of us have for our East Anglian ‘neighbours’, while also acknowledging the futility of all the bragging rights, such as the ‘we have history’ versus ‘we have crowds’ arguments. He makes the valid point that unlike inner-city rivalries – Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Bristol etcetera – the Norwich/Ipswich one is not played out between people likely to mingle in an office or playground, unless you happen to live in the ‘fuzzy area where the borders collide’. Perhaps this actually adds to the sense of rivalry and prejudices, coupled with the vast distances which both clubs’ fans face on the road to almost every other Championship fixture.
I found myself smiling at the fact that Gowers finds ‘the blow of a defeat softened’ by a Town loss, and even the discovery of an Ipswich win taking ‘the edge off the joy of victory’. Yes, reader, I suffer from a similar obsession. I will even watch and savour Norwich journalist Michael Bailey’s post-match summaries online, so long as they have not won. Coming out of Portman Road on the opening day of the season, relieved and buoyed by a last-gasp equaliser, the news that City had equalised even later into stoppage time at Birmingham genuinely annoyed me. Ridiculous, but true, I am embarrassed to admit.
Our own Benjamin Bloom did a well-balanced piece last season about the validity of the rivals’ bragging rights. We know that ITFC’s achievements under Ramsay and Robson surpass any achievements made on the pitch throughout Norwich’s history. Equally, we have to acknowledge that City’s home support is currently far greater than our own. Is this a logical result of a city which has a far larger population? Or is it due to the presence of Norwich in four of the eight most recent Premier League campaigns, coupled with Town’s painfully extended stay in the second tier? Or a combination of both factors?
I am objective enough to take off my blue-tinted glasses and accept that Carrow Road is now a smarter stadium than our own. And that Norwich’s city centre is a more attractive place in which to shop or stroll. I will even confess to feeling jealous when Norwich threatened to establish themselves in the top flight with two mid-table finishes under Lambert and Hughton. As we begin yet another marathon season in the Championship, I would admit that the ‘we have history’ claim is becoming harder to cling to, despite my pride in past successes.
What I find more interesting than the past is the present and immediate future of our club. In some respects, by appointing Paul Hurst, ITFC have taken a similar left-field approach as Norwich took a year earlier when bringing in Daniel Farke as Head Coach. Both clubs have decided – for a mixture of sporting and financial reasons – to look for a different approach. Both installed bosses with no experience of Championship football. Both have recruited players who have never played at this level before. And yet, of course, the two appointments are, equally, polar opposites. A German manager who had previously been in charge of a reserve team at Dortmund, as opposed to an English manager who has worked his way up from part-time non-league clubs to a modest-sized EFL1 one. German-based players signed up, as opposed to players from the likes of Accrington and Shrewsbury. Both clubs have taken risks in terms of players and management. Both have entered into the unknown in search of an alternative (aka lower-cost) route to the Promised Land. If it all goes Pete Tong this season in Norfolk and/or Suffolk, then you wonder what each will do next. Carrow Road season ticket sales have dropped slightly and the jury is out among their supporter base as to the style and effectiveness of Farke’s football vision. Meanwhile, any feel-good factor created by Hurst’s appointment will be short-lived if the spectacle does not match fans’ hopes. The honeymoon period for a new manager and/or approach does not last long. Obviously a derby success in a few weeks’ time would help Hurst establish himself after almost a decade of Norwich dominance. Ultimately, though, bragging rights will count for little if – come May 2019 – neither set of fans feel that their club is making progress in its football revolution. What would constitute success at ITFC in the 2018-19 season? Possibly a campaign in which high-octane football allowed us to stop casting an eye at our touchscreens to see how Norwich City are getting on. To rework Gary Gowers’ title, too much time spent dwelling on events north of the border is possibly a natural by-product of hard times closer to home.
© Rodney Marshall | Follow on twitter - @RodneyMarshall1
I used to attend as many pre-season friendly matches as I could. It was an opportunity to get a football fix after the frustration of the close season; a first glimpse of any new players; the chance to exchange a few words with a favourite player; an early look at a new manager’s tactics, style of play, etcetera. Perhaps, like arriving at the stadium on match day ninety minutes before kick-off, it is simply one of those habits I have grown out of. While others would no doubt disagree, pre-season matches now feel like treading water or time wasted. The results are meaningless and often misleading. You cannot celebrate any of the goals in any real sense and so many players nowadays come into the building in the final days – or even hours – of the transfer window that you do not even come away with an idea of what to expect once the season gets underway.
One thing which has not changed, though, is the nervous excitement which greets me on the opening day of the new season. Despite my advancing years, it still feels special. Even if – deep down – you know that you would accept mid-table and a decent cup run – there is something unique about travelling to that first match top equal in the table. OK, thanks to Sky bringing forward Reading versus Derby to the Friday evening, that was not the case. However, it remains a day when every fan can dream of a magical season, if only for a few hours. In an age where social media is king, it was time to put that #ANewEra hashtag to a first test.
Greater Anglia had not, unfortunately, entered the spirit of the occasion. The 13:47 from Stowmarket was running half an hour late and when it finally rocked up it consisted of just one carriage. With a healthy smattering of Town fans getting on it was uncomfortably squashed, made worse once more supporters pushed on at Needham Market. What with the heat, the delay and the lack of breathing space it was a far from ideal prelude to the opening day fixture.
Two hours later I am not sure that we were any wiser about what it will be like supporting ITFC under Paul Hurst. The match had the perfect start: high energy pressing and a great team goal. Portman Road exploded with joy. Town then began to look inexperienced and vulnerable against a Blackburn side which has been playing together for a year. The final ten minutes of the match saw Town begin to finally apply pressure, even if the equaliser was a fortunate one. While it had been great to see a genuine winger taking opponents on and showing some artistry, it would clearly take time for Hurst to finish assembling his squad, never mind it gelling. The New Era might equally be called the Left-field Gamble. Most of us had wanted the club to head in a new direction. It had done. However, with so many of the new players being unfamiliar with life in the second tier, no one left a relieved Portman Road with any firm idea where this ‘work in progress’ was heading.
Were the bookies and national football reporters right to make ITFC one of the favourites for relegation? Having finished comfortably mid-table in 2017-18, were they basing this bleak prediction solely on the loss of MM’s savvy experience? If so, this plays straight into the ‘be careful what you wish for’ mantra of a minority of Town fans. Would Paul Hurst continue to prove a miracle worker on a tight budget? Or would he now be punching above his weight? Who would plug the gap created by the sale of Martyn Waghorn? Can 27 Championship goals and assists grow on lower league trees? There were so many questions running through my head on the way home. Predictably, despite the late, late equaliser, Twitter was populated with Suffolk doom merchants after this opening match. ‘Relegation fodder’, ‘no better than it was under MM’… Unfortunately, one of the down sides of social media is the knee-jerk reactions, the unthinking ease with which people – often not even at the game – ping a negative or corrosive remark into the virtual ether.
If forty odd opening days have taught me one thing, it is that they tend to teach us nothing. This is even more the case when a club is attempting a mini-revolution. A year ago who thought that Sunderland – freshly armed with a £40 million parachute payment – would suffer a second successive relegation? Or that Warnock’s unfancied Cardiff would go up automatically? First day nerves are proof of at least two things: that we still passionately care; and that we have no idea where the new 46 game marathon journey is taking us. The torment of relegation? The euphoria of promotion? The calm of mid-table? Who knows? As a number of famous writers have suggested, maybe life (as a football fan) is a journey, not a destination. Let us try to enjoy the ride.
© Rodney Marshall | Follow on twitter - @RodneyMarshall1
Paul Hurst will take his place in the home dugout at Portman Road in front of a crowd full of excitement, passion and togetherness when Ipswich host Blackburn on Saturday.
Although the first game of the season usually portrays these emotions from the fans of any team, I think the fact that Ipswich fans, myself included, are showing them with such abundance is a big shock.
The fans have spent the best part of 18 months bickering between each other about the situation regarding the previous manager Mick McCarthy for numerous reasons, mainly the style of play. When it was announced McCarthy would leave his post at the end of March, the divide looked like it would be around for a while.
However, with the new season about to begin, it seems that divide has been fixed and Town fans are as one again and ready for the new era to begin.
But how has this happened and what does it mean for Ipswich in the coming season?
Marcus Evans has to take a fair amount of credit for fixing the tattered relationship. Not always in Town fans good books, and fairly so at times, this summer he set about repairing the relationship with the club and the fans and has done a superb job.
It started with his first on-screen interview that finally meant that after 10 years, we knew what the owner sounded like! Although the interview was conducted by the club, he made sure that the questions he answered were ones that the fans wanted to hear and that was the first step.
He then appointed Paul Hurst after a long and thorough recruiting process that lasted over 2 months. Something of an unknown before last year, Paul Hurst had just had a hugely successful season at Shrewsbury, guiding them to the play-off final when they were one of the favourites for relegation.
It was clear that this man was top of Evans list. He waited until Shrewsbury’s campaign had come to a close before approaching them regarding Hurst, despite this meaning he missed out on another top target, Jack Ross, to Sunderland.
Since Hurst’s appointment on the 30th May, it’s been clear that this is a man most Town fans wanted to see. A young, hungry manager who has a style of play that is exciting and fun to watch. Someone with a good knowledge of the lower leagues that can utilise that area of the transfer market. Ipswich aren’t going to be spending £8 million on a new striker or £5 million on a new defender, it’s just not going to happen, so a manager who has come up through the pyramid and has a wider knowledge of players from those leagues is always going to please the fans.
Friendlies against Braintree, Crawley, Barnet and MK Dons were all used as games to become more accustomed to this different way of playing and the home friendly against West Ham was a chance for Hurst to showcase this and to show fans what they can expect from this team he is building. And I think it’s safe to say they were impressed. Despite losing 2-1, new signings Ellis Harrison, from Bristol Rovers, and Gwion Edwards, from Peterborough, were impressive. The former getting Ipswich’s goal.
More pleasing was the performance of the three academy graduates in the centre of midfield. Flynn Downes, Andre Dozzell and Tristan Nydam, all 19 years old, showed maturity beyond their years against a powerful West Ham midfield containing former England international Jack Wilshere. Any football fan loves to see an academy graduate come through the ranks and make it to the first team and these three certainly look like doing that this season.
All of this means Ipswich are very much starting fresh in the coming season. The club is full of new faces (and hopefully a few more by the time the transfer window closes!), the fans are singing as one and most importantly, everyone is excited to get to Portman Road again.
We’ve signed players from lower leagues that all have something to prove and will want to show they are capable of performing in the Championship, a league that it is getting increasingly difficult to get out of each season. It’s a recruitment policy that has worked in the past for other teams including an example Ipswich fans know all too well with Norwich doing it to go from League 1 to the Premier League in the blink of an eye. That’s not to say it will be the same for us but it’s proof that it can be done.
I personally have no idea how this season is going to go. It could go horribly wrong and we end up relegated. Similarly, it could all click together and we make a real push for the play-offs.
I just don’t know. And that what is exciting me most this season, the unknown. The unknown players and the unknown manager in a league we, by now, know very well indeed.
Follow on twitter - @CraigBolger