Town boss Paul Lambert says getting the fans coming back to Portman Road has given him the greatest satisfaction during his first year in charge, while he says the club’s Playford Road training ground was “horrendous” 12 months ago and has undergone significant work since then. Lambert was speaking, along with members of his staff and general manager of football operations Lee O’Neill, at the annual Meet the Club event at the Supporters Club’s AGM.
Lambert and O’Neill were joined by assistant manager Stuart Taylor and fitness coach Jim Henry, while members of the club’s off-field staff also took questions from the floor. PLC director Peter Over chaired.
The Blues boss, who celebrated one year in charge on Sunday, was warmly welcomed by fans, many thanking him for reconnecting the club and its fans over the last year.
Lambert said that is what has given him greatest satisfaction since taking over at Portman Road.
"I think the fans coming back, I think that’s the biggest thing,” he reflected. "I said before, there’s no game without the supporters.
"The fans now are starting to come back. It’s terrible saying this, but I actually felt sorry for the club the way it was dipping and dipping, it’s too big a club to go the way it was, [the fans] have to be behind it.
"It was too big to let that go, the disconnection was too much. I felt ‘Dear oh dear, this can’t go on’. So that coming back, the support coming back.
"It’s not just the numbers, what’s happening in the stadium is fantastic, good, bad or indifferent the atmosphere’s there. The fans going to away games, for me that’s been the biggest turnaround for me.”
Asked what other changes have been made that fans might not be aware of, he spoke at length about the state of Playford Road when he took over.
"The training ground was horrendous, it really was,” he said. "I keep going back to it, for the size of the club it should never, ever have happened. I’d never seen anything like it for the size of the club. I could understand if it was a small club and that was the foundation of it.
"What was wrong with it? Everything. Honestly. I thought it was terrible, I really did. There wasn’t a recovery place for the lads to go after games. There was no blue basically, there wasn’t enough blue, there weren’t any badges to indicate where you were.
"So many things that were wrong. The structure there wasn’t right. The security of the fencing, people could just come off the street on to that area and play football or play whatever they wanted to play.
"The whole thing was wrong. I remember a chat with [owner] Marcus [Evans] about it and to be fair to him he’s been brilliant with it. I think everybody recognises that the training ground was nowhere to the level that the football club deserved.
"I think it was tired. Everything was wrong. The whole bloody thing was a mess. And that’s been a lot of work.
"It wasn’t just building a football team, you were actually building a football club again to try and give it some sort of uplift.”
Lambert was even unhappy with the signage at the gates: "The first thing you should see flashing right in your face is ‘Ipswich Town Football Club’ or ‘Welcome to Ipswich Town Football Club’. It was a bomb site, the whole thing. Even the entrance to Bent Lane, that gate, it’s horrendous.”
Fitness coach Henry continued: "There has been a significant amount investment into the football club in the last year. The recovery suite alone is certainly worth about £90,000.
"And anything we’ve asked for so far we’ve got regarding that. We’ve got a GPS system which is basically a Premier League set-up, Lee put that in place at the start of last season and we’ve continued to use it, heartbeat monitors. There’s been a huge investment.
"Even the manager’s area that we work in daily, Marcus has spent a lot of money in the last year getting it up to scratch and we’re definitely getting there.
"For the players, recovery suite is very important, basically before they didn’t have anywhere to go, they had no spa facility, that’s all in place, that makes a massive difference.”
Lambert added: "Everything was really, really tired and it came to the stage when I thought it was never-ending. We used to have meetings every morning where we said we need to get that sorted and that sorted because a football club has to have an infrastructure and if the team wasn’t performing it was falling from a great height.
"If there’s an infrastructure it only falls a little bit and bounces back. Now we’re starting to get that. We’ve still got, bloody hell, a helluva long way to go but it’s definitely a better environment than it was 12 months ago.”
You can find notes on the rest of the question and answers at the event on the TWTD Forum, here.
Earlier in the even, at the Supporters Club AGM part of the evening, Mark Ramsay was reappointed chairperson, Martin Swallow vice-chair, Mandy Garner events co-ordinator and Trish Clarke secretary, while Sandra Cuningham, Max Helm from Blue Action, Nathan Parris and Irene Davey were voted on to the committee and Steve Doe remains treasurer.