"You don’t have to love everyone but you have to respect them and I think there was a healthy respect within the changing room.”
A couple of months into the first season back in the First Division, now the Championship, Joe Royle was appointed Town boss.
"Fantastic man manager, the best I’ve been with,” enthused Magilton, who Royle handed the captain’s armband in July 2003 following Matt Holland’s departure.
"He and George were fantastic. Joe was just a fantastic man manager, I loved playing for him, I loved working with him.
"He had, which is lost in the game, a fantastic sense of humour, which is important and he knew the game, knew players inside-out.
"He built up two strong squads. One that should have been promoted, again that shoulda, woulda, coulda, with Benty [Darren Bent] and with Shefki [Kuqi].
"At Christmas we were five points clear and then it just petered away again. Joe deserves massive credit for what he did in bringing the club back to becoming real competitors again in the league. And in all fairness he had a good squad to do that with.”
Royle had to deal with administration and an exodus of the club’s talent early in his time at Portman Road.
"With his vast experience in the game I thought he dealt with that really well,” Magilton continued. "He came across really well and I think he had a bond with the fans that was built up because of their healthy respect for what he did during those really difficult times.”
After the frustration of missing out on automatic promotion on the final day - Paul Jewell’s Wigan and Mick McCarthy’s Sunderland went up - and then losing to West Ham in the play-offs for a second year, there was another squad exodus in the summer of 2005. Bent, Kuqi and Tommy Miller, who had scored 44 goals between them, departed along with keeper Kelvin Davis.
"There was such a come down,” Magilton recalled. "I remember in pre-season, just remember feeling slightly deflated and slightly sorry for Joe to a large extent because how do you replace goals like that? Where do you start? How do you become competitive again at that level, knowing that you’ve lost so many quality players? And people don’t want to give up their players easily unless you want to pay for them.
"I was thinking that the season was going to be tough, and it proved to be. It proved to be a real grind.”
Town ended that 2005/06 campaign 15th in the Championship, a creditable performance in the circumstances.
Magilton had made it known it would be his last with the Blues and was preparing to move away from Suffolk when news of Royle’s surprise exit broke. Part three will cover Magilton successfully throwing his hat in the ring for the manager's job and his first season in charge.