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McKenna Happy to Keep Opposition Bosses Guessing - Ipswich Town News

Manager Kieran McKenna is happy to keep his fellow bosses guessing when it comes to selecting his front players.

The Blues boss has made a habit of rotating his forward players on a match-by-match basis, the switching of the three who started against Derby - Tyreece John-Jules, Kayden Jackson and Marcus Harness - for the Port Vale game - in which Freddie Ladapo, Kyle Edwards and Conor Chaplin were in the XI - illustrative of his approach.

Those that don't start are usually involved from around the hour mark from the bench.

"I think it’s helpful, it’s not certainly the only reason why we do it,” he said when asked whether the regular changes of personnel is to give his fellow managers something else to think about ahead of a game.

"The focus is on us first and what strength we want to bring to the game and what areas we want to try and exploit.

"But, of course, from personal experience, it’s more difficult to prepare against a team when they have variations of what they do.

"And Charlton are one of those teams, to be fair, who have, even within their same system, different variations that they can use.

"And that makes it a little bit more difficult to plan because you can’t speak in definites to your players, you have to prepare them for a couple of different scenarios.

"I think it’s a healthy position to be in where we have versatile forwards, who can play in different roles and have different skillsets and strengths within that department.

"That means that they can play the same role in different ways and I think those variations that we have hopefully make it a bit more difficult for the opposition to be absolutely certain what they’re going to see on a matchday against us.”

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