The Portman Road faithful will be joined by a party of youngsters from striker Daryl Murphy’s old school, St Paul's Community College in Waterford, for Saturday’s crucial game against Nottingham Forest.
The current Town squad has strong Waterford connections with Stephen and Noel Hunt also hailing from the Irish city and manager Mick McCarthy’s father having come from the area.
The trip has been organised by teacher Barry Williams, who earlier in the season decorated a classroom with Town memorabilia (see photo above), some of it supplied by old boy Murphy.
As well as taking in the game, the pupils will watch the players training at Playford Road and have a look around Portman Road, as well as meeting up with Murphy and the Hunt brothers. Barry told TWTD about the background to the visit.
The trip came about from my having the metalwork room in the school decorated with a lot of Ipswich Town items and supporting Town, and also Matt Keane and myself going to games.
Matt, a sports broadcaster with local radio station WLRfm, a journalist and lifelong Town fan, has been a great help to the school in getting this trip going, although unfortunately he was not available to travel for this weekend, but hopefully he will come with us on future trips.
Every year we take a group of students to a Premier League game in England, however, this year a number of the students were talking about the the Blues’ promotion push and Murph’s great season. There are a good few of the students who now follow Town’s results every week.
So I proposed the idea that we run our tour this year to Ipswich and offered it to Year Three and Four students aged 15 and 16. We had a good positive take on the places available so we went ahead and booked the first of, I hope, many trips to Ipswich for St Paul's students.
There is a lot of excitement with the Waterford connection to the lads in the squad and particularly with Murph, who is a past pupil of the school. We have eight current students in the school travelling and four past students who were also interested in going on the trip. Hopefully we can create a link between Ipswich and Waterford and make this an annual trip and next year maybe we will be getting a Premier League game at Portman Road. Barry and some of the youngsters will be appearing on Saturday’s Life’s a Pitch on BBC Radio Suffolk (12-2pm).
Barry Williams
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