Blues loan midfielder Kalvin Phillips says he’s loving life at Town following his frustrating move to Manchester City and subsequent loan to Saturday’s opponents West Ham.
Phillips, 28, says he made his season-long switch to the Portman Road in the summer to get playing again having been unable to break into the team at City following his £42 million move to the Etihad Stadium in July 2022.
Speaking in the My Mate’s a Footballer podcast, which is hosted by comedian Joe Wilkinson and his former Leeds teammate Patrick Bamford, Phillips said he’s "loving” life in Suffolk, even though "I'd never expect myself to be down here” and knew "straight away” that boss Kieran McKenna would "put trust in me and make sure that everything that he did was for my benefit”.
Phillips says Leif Davis, who he knew from his time at hometown club Leeds, spent time persuading him to make the move in the summer:
"Leif was Facetiming me every day for the three weeks before I signed,” he revealed.
"The main reason I came to Ipswich was just just to get back playing football week in week out, and make sure that I'm fit again, and I'm not getting many injuries,” he said.
"Just back to enjoying my football because obviously I loved it at City, they’re the best team in the world, they’ve got amazing players and amazing people there [but] it’s kind of draining when you know you’re not going to play on the weekend and you’ve still got to go in and train as well as you can and hopefully make yourself better and better everyday. With nothing to look forward to on the weekend it’s hard.
"It just got to a point where I knew that I probably weren't going to play much because of the players that play in front of me, which you know, I can't really argue about that.”
Phillips admitted that Pep Guardiola’s public comments accusing the midfielder of returning from the Qatar World Cup, for which the City boss later apologised, had a longer-term impact.
"I think that narrative on social media just kind of grew and grew,” he reflected. "Every club that I’d go to, I spoke to, like the manager and the nutritionist and stuff like that, they’d always speak about weight before they’d say anything else. And it got to the point where it peed me off a little bit. I was getting quite frustrated with it.”
However, Phillips had praise for Guardiola and the way he could foresee how a game was going to pan out.
"The first game we played, West Ham away, in my first season there, he literally told the team in a meeting probably two days before how the game was going to play out,” he recalled.
"He said West Ham are going to start well, they’re going to put us under pressure and then we’re going to have a little bit of time, we’re going to get opportunities to get the ball to Kevin [De Bruyne], and then if Kevin plays it behind for Erling [Haaland] then we’re more than likely going to score [how City scored their second goal].
"He just mentioned different ways that we could attack and then how they’re going to press us and then you’d seen it happen in real life. And I was just sat there like, this is ridiculous. I couldn’t believe it.
"At one point I was gobsmacked how it just worked out and I could see exactly what he was saying happening on the pitch.”
Regarding his spell with the Hammers, he added: "At West Ham, I felt like there were quite a lot of eyes on me because it was my first loan move since going to City.
"Obviously it didn't work out well and I got quite a bit of stick. Sometimes you can handle that well, sometimes you can go the other way and handle it not so well!”
Phillips has made three Premier League appearances for the Blues since making his move and is yet to taste defeat with Town drawing all three of those matches.