A new manager, nine new signings, and a town full of support.. but why isn’t it working?
Let’s first take a look back at the last time Ipswich welcomed a new manager to the club, Mick McCarthy. A team that looked destined for League One when Paul Jewell was sacked, the club seemingly became a completely new team under McCarthy, which included a play-off push in 2014/15 which was incredible, to say the least as he battled the financial backing, or lack of, from Marcus Evans.
Mick McCarthy definitely left the team in a better condition than when he came into the club, but that didn’t exactly mean that the team was going to work.
Paul Hurst took over during the summer, and filled the club with fresh, unknown new faces, with most players coming from lower leagues, and some of Towns best players being sold or released, it looked like a risky move to improve a team that’s found its home in England’s second division.
As many, like myself thought, it didn’t work, or at least it’s not working at the moment. The opening day of the season was eventful, to say the least, a 2-2 draw with newly promoted Blackburn. The result really wasn’t too tough to get over; a team full of momentum and hunger to get back to the Premier League – and we get a point! Rotherham was a completely different game, dominating and controlling the whole game but losing, it felt like 2011/12 all over again.
It’s sad to say that the feeling of not progressing continues, Ipswich most recently lost to Derby County, a team destined for the play-offs surely. Although most managers struggle in their first season in charge with the pressures of finding out how their team should and will work, it seems as if the morale around Ipswich remains sour with not many people having high hopes for the club.
Without winning a competitive game since taking over, it’s clear Hurst is still finding out what he finds is best for the team.
Only time will tell if the ‘new era’ will work, or if Paul Hurst is just another name that fans will soon forget.
Let’s hope Ipswich pick up form, gel together and give fans what they’ve been craving for over a decade and a half.
Ryan Fletcher / Follow on twitter - @RyanFJournalism
**Original post here: https://the92blog.com/2018/08/22/whats-going-wrong-a-look-into-ipswichs-new-era/ (re-published with the author and websites permission)
Perhaps it is partly because football is a (deceptively) simple game, but every fan fancies themselves as an expert. Podcasts, tweets, messages on Facebook, we are all quick to point out supposed failings in team selections or tactics. The inference is that we know better than the professionals. Which, of course, is ridiculous. As Roberto Martinez observes in Michael Calvin’s Living on the Volcano, people often ignore the painfully obvious failings after a fortunate victory, or overreact negatively to an unlucky defeat. We watch football in black and white, seemingly unaware of all the colours in between. The public reaction to England’s performances at Russia 2018 is a perfect example of this. The voices of doom before the tournament began told us that Southgate’s men were destined to fail. Then, as the squad made its way to the semi-finals, almost everyone – or so it seemed – naively expected England to sweep past Croatia. Neither the pre-tournament pessimism, nor the subsequent tidal wave of (blind?) optimism, were justified. To win a World Cup tournament you arguably need three things: a unified group, a tactically-astute game plan, and a technically gifted side. England had the first two; France had all three. Simple.
As Paul Hurst tries to find a winning formula for his newly-assembled squad, questions are already being asked… about his tactics, his recruitment and his ability to adapt to the Championship. Can he make his single striker 4-2-3-1 formation work? Will the new players who have stepped up from the lower divisions be good enough? (As yet, no one seems to be questioning the squad’s spirit.)
Let us rewind a few months. The majority of ITFC fans asked for change. Many voted with their feet. We all knew that Hurst would not be able to reboot or reconstruct a Championship squad overnight. It takes time: for new players to settle, for existing ones to adjust to a more high-energy, high-pressing game plan, and for the 2018-19 group to learn to live, work and play with each other.
Everyone understands the need for patience when it comes to tasty food and drink. Producing a rich beef bourguignon, or a fine bottle of red wine takes time. We know that you cannot rush either of these and that our patience will hopefully be rewarded. And yet, as fans, we are always looking for ‘fast food’ footballing solutions, despite demanding quality. We seem to be unable or unwilling to give a new manager a few precious months to carefully blend his footballing ingredients and then cook up a recipe for success.
As Paul Tisdale observes in Living on the Volcano:
‘Football has a hothouse environment. That’s why it doesn’t really work in this country. The root is poor. It’s just scrap and a bun fight to get who you can. It’s all about the here and now.’ [1]
Interestingly, the maverick Tisdale describes himself as ‘not necessarily a win at all costs manager’. [2] Perhaps more fans and clubs need to take on board this leftfield philosophy, able to see the bigger picture. Exeter and Tisdale were a perfect match. Supporter-owned City are a rarity, a club which allowed their manager to organically grow the club, willing to accept that there would be bumps along the way. As Michael Calvin’s book demonstrates, visionary managers attempting to put in place long-term sustainable projects are almost never given the time to do so.
Part of the problem is the way social media has intensified the goldfish bowl nature of professional football clubs. Forums breed discontent far quicker than they engender harmony. Mediocre performances are greeted with instant, negative messages and tweets. Everything is scrutinised and over-analysed. Paul Hurst confessed to being amazed by the reaction of journalists and fans to his critical post-match comments at Exeter. He was baffled by the (needless?) amount of debate which his blunt reaction had created.
Arsene Wenger, in the Foreword to Living on the Volcano, bemoans the pressure for ‘short-term results’, suggesting that ‘clubs need stability’ and that managers need to be ‘given the time to create a culture at the club, which is so important.’ [3] He sets out four ‘key ingredients’ in the recipe for a successful manager: ‘the passion an individual has for the sport; man management; the ability to evolve and adapt; and, of course, an eye for talent.’ [4] Paul Hurst clearly has the passion, and his track record suggests he has those other qualities as well. He needs time to demonstrate these in the Championship, a league which Calvin sees as the worst environment for managers, ‘the crucible’ where ‘impatience’ has become ever more institutionalised.’ [5]
Five league and cup games played: no victories. Five; not fifteen, or even ten. While many supporters are still calling for patience, others are already suggesting that the club made a poor managerial appointment and that we are destined for a season of relegation struggles. Social media encourages knee-jerk over-reaction. We all know the saying about ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. Well, you need to give the chef time to cook the damn thing up in the first place. If you want fast food, head to McDonald’s.
© Rodney Marshall | Follow on twitter - @RodneyMarshall1
1. Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager, Michael Calvin, 2015, p. 375.
2. Living on the Volcano, p. 383.
3. Living on the Volcano, p. xiv.
4. Living on the Volcano, p. xiii.
5. Living on the Volcano, p. 421.
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