 [Blog] The 2010/2011 Season In NumbersWritten by CherryHintonBlue on Tuesday, 10th May 2011 11:08 It's time for the end of season round-ups, and Chris Rand pauses for one last time to remember a season which, despite having some remarkable moments, he'll be quite happy to consign to history. It was just 46 matches ago when Town began the 2010/11 campaign on fire, with an away win at Middlesbrough, the bookies' favourites for promotion to the Premier League. Jonny Walters tested the Boro defence throughout, and Jonathan Stead thumped in a third with a quarter of an hour to spare. Remember that? How long ago does it seem to you? When you think of all the water that's passed under the bridge since then, it certainly hasn't been an uneventful season. Yet it's easier to list the worst moments than it is the best ones, and the record books will show the club finished just two places higher than the season before, one of the least successful in Town's modern history. It had all started so well. After seven matches, Ipswich were in second place in the table (how soon we forget!), and although it was already clear that QPR were going to be a class apart, a strong promotion challenge was the least that supporters were expecting. Town had also breezed through three rounds of the Carling Cup, a competition in which the club's campaigns usually end almost as soon as they start. Perhaps Roy Keane had finally got things right after all? Or perhaps not. Between then and mid-December, Town lost an unprecedented 10 league matches out of 13 (well, almost unprecedented: the club had lost that many in 13 games at this level once before, in the 1954/55 season). By the time of the bizarre home win against Leicester in the snow just before Christmas, Town had been overtaken by over half of the division and were in an alarming 18th place. The knives were out for Keane again, and the team could do nothing right. November had seen the third anniversary of the last time Town had scored four goals in a Portman Road league game (a record which, shamefully, is still lengthening), and a home defeat by Barnsley which saw the Town fans olé-ing a passing sequence by the away team in the second half. It looked like even such basics were beyond Ipswich. The month finished with the unthinkable: conceding four goals against Norwich for the first time in the club's history. For this alone, many fans would probably never forgive Keane, and indeed the almost personality-free squad he had expensively assembled. In October and November, TWTD readers voted the unremarkable Tamas Priskin as Town's man of the match for seven matches in succession, even though he only scored twice in that time. The only Carling Cup tie in that awful October and November was an easy home match against Northampton, and so Town found themselves, curiously, in the quarter-finals, where they would surely be thrashed by West Bromwich Albion. Certainly the fans thought so, with just 11,363 turning up to see a Premier League team at Portman Road for the first time in over two years. It was only the sixth sub-12,000 crowd in 10 years, and all the others had been against lower league opponents. But the Baggies were dreadful on the night, and suddenly it was the semi-finals, for only the fourth time in the club's history. Things were coming to the boil, and January proved to be probably the most eventful month for Ipswich for 10 years or so. As if two semi-finals against Arsenal weren't enough, we'd also had the bizarre sight of Serge out of Kasabian and Noel out of Oasis drawing Town away at Chelsea in the FA Cup ...for the second time in three seasons. If Marcus Evans has hoped his investment would eventually get him some pre-match socialising in plush Big Four hospitality suites, he'd struck gold earlier than expected. By this time, however, Roy Keane's policy of selecting whichever players had impressed him most in training that week looked as much like sheer panic as indecisiveness. It's unlikely the club had previously in its history had 28 different players starting matches by Christmas. At the strangest time, just two days before the Chelsea game but after an sixth home defeat of the season, Keane was dismissed, and poor Ian McParland got the task of overseeing Town's inevitable thrashing by one of the Premier League giants. It was only the third time since the mid-sixties that a Town side had conceded seven goals in a match. I doubt anybody knows how the club, by this time on its knees, turned a damage limitation exercise against Arsenal a few days later into one of the most famous victories at Portman Road since the Robson era. Priskin's winner meant that McParland's two-match managerial spell will probably forever rank as the oddest in the club's history. And so to Paul Jewell, and a new chapter for Ipswich. His half-season (nearly) was characterised by some extreme inconsistency, but in those 22 league matches Town were comfortably mid-table (the club had the 10th best record in the division over that period), so at least the prospect of relegation was happily avoided. Indeed, for the first few matches, until being put back in their place by QPR, Town were on fire, culminating in a 6-0 win at Doncaster, only the tenth win by six or more goals in the club's history, and only the third ever away from home. But most fans seemed to be looking forward to the end of the season with more enthusiasm than usual, and after November's worst local derby defeat ever, there followed an even worse one. The last day of the season couldn't come quickly enough for some of us. The team, which conceded 14 goals in the last four matches, seemed to have given up too. The entire squad was so devoid of fan-favourites that the supporters spent the last 10 minutes of the home season ironically cheering every touch from the popular but seemingly-rejected Jaime Peters, and voted a loan player who was only at the club for three months as Player of the Year. Town ended up having used 33 different players to start matches this season, almost certainly an all-time club record. The top league scorer, Jason Scotland, managed just 10 goals, but at least for only the second time in the past six seasons, three players staggered to eight. At least one of those is leaving in the summer, although the previous season all of the three highest league scorers (Stead, Walters and Daryl Murphy) left fairly swiftly. However, the big statistic of the season was probably the atrocious home record. Town conceded 37 goals at Portman Road. Letting in this many has only happened once before - ever - at this level, but that was in 2002/03 when the team banged in 49 at the other end, so it wasn't quite as important. Town conceded three or more goals at home on seven occasions, something which has only happened once before, back in the early sixties. More importantly, Town lost 10 matches at Portman Road for the first time in the club's history at this level. The home fans' patience has been tested to the limit, surely. But now it's time to forget it all, because Paul Jewell will rebuild the squad yet again over the summer, won't he? And we'll be in with a chance of promotion next season, won't we? Of course we will.
PS: Some of you may remember me predicting in February that it would take a very low number of points to make the play-offs this season (70, I said), and require a very high number to avoid relegation (54). This was partially because the league table was distributed much more evenly than usual, which is why it was so easy for Town to slide from one end to the other in a few weeks. Even more importantly, a severe lack of draws meant more points than normal were being awarded. However, the second half of the season didn't conform to this pattern at all, and my predictions proved way out. With the exception of Reading joining the party, the top 6 pulled away comfortably, and at the other end, the bottom three fell away equally sharply. QPR's 88 points still wouldn't have got them into the top two last season, and Norwich's 84 wouldn't have done so in the majority of recent seasons (Town got 87 in 1999/00 and only came third). There were a lot more draws mid-table in the second half of the season. I did say at the mid-season point that "making predictions in extreme conditions is always dubious", and so it proved. Sorry! Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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