Blues chairman and CEO Mark Ashton admits he was concerned by the interest in manager Kieran McKenna at the end of last season, but at the same time couldn’t envisage him anywhere else at this stage of his career.
As the dust settled on Town’s promotion back to the Premier League after 22 years away, speculation grew regarding the Northern Irishman’s future.
McKenna is understood to have come very close to joining Brighton while also holding talks with Chelsea and Manchester United, where he was a first-team coach prior to joining Town.
Ashton says tying McKenna down to a new multi-million-pound four-year deal was the club’s best signing of the close season.
"I think it always was going to be,” Ashton told Life’s a Pitch TV. "He’s been instrumental to the rise of this club since the day he joined.
"We work as one. The two of us are the same, we’re just totally obsessed with it and as I’m given the oxygen to do my job by my owners, my job is to put a bubble round Kieran and give him the oxygen and let him do his job unhindered.
"I’m not at the training ground every day, I don’t need to be at the training ground every day, that’s his office. He doesn’t need to be in my office every single day.
"We know what we’re doing, we trust each other and he was the best and the key signing of the summer because once we’d done that, we could all take a deep breath and move forward again.”
Ashton confirmed that the interest from other clubs was very real: "Absolutely. Was I concerned by any of them? I think I was concerned before then because I knew what was coming. When you’re in the game long enough, you speak to people, you hear the chatter, you know what chatter to trust and a couple of people in the industry had called me and said, ‘’I’m giving you a heads-up, you’ve got a problem coming’.
"And the problem was that he was an attraction to bigger clubs than probably most would have expected at that point of his career.
"But back-to-back promotions and a very, very talented manager was always going to draw attention.
"As I’ve said before, my job wasn’t to try and persuade Kieran to stay, my job was to sit down with him, look at the pros and cons of each one, then say ‘You take it away, you then have to make your call’.
"But I am going to give you hard, cold facts of why Ipswich, where we were at, what we can become, what we can do together, this journey’s not over.
"And then he called me one Saturday morning, we’d spent most of the time at my house discussing all this, and said, ‘Can I come round and see you?’ and I said yes.”
But he says he believed it wasn’t the right time for McKenna, still only 38, to move elsewhere.
"I just had faith in him,” Ashton reflected. "In my mind, I couldn’t picture him at that point anywhere else other than with us.
"I thought he handled himself extremely well, it’s not easy when you’ve got adulation and people want you and big sums of money and it’s life-changing. I thought he was calm, focused, the professional Kieran we all know and love.
"I’ll be honest with you, he came in, he didn’t sit down, he put his arms round me, gave me a hug and said, ‘I want to stay’.”
Looking back at the transfer window, in which the Blues signed 12 players, the first in the Premier League since the disastrous summer of 2001, Ashton added: "The process is the same but we’re now fishing in a very different pond with a much bigger set of numbers. You make mistakes with that set of numbers, you’ve got a problem.
"So the due diligence and the detail has to be more and we work as a really close-knit unit and that close-knit unit is really me, [chief operating officer] Luke [Werhun] and Kieran, that’s the tip of the sword, the three of us.
"Kieran will be the last call I have when I go to bed and he’ll be the first call when I wake up.”
He continued: "You mind-meld into one, you shut the outside world out and it is call after call after call. I’ve literally today got a new mobile because at the end of the transfer window, the other one just burnt out.
"You can’t not take any call and I think we probably were at a 70/80 per cent hit-rate of our number one targets. There were a couple that we moved on and you get down the line and you realise that it isn’t going to be doable and you have to change direction.
"It’s not easy and I have to manage the noise, I have to put the noise out because we’re linked with everybody. You have to understand, when we’re linked with someone, we’re linked with them for a reason; their agent is doing it to create a market, the club is doing it because they either want to sell or they want to buy, an agent is doing it to upset another agent to pinch the player.
"And my job is to get underneath that spider’s web with Luke to understand the real state of play and what’s going on. It’s a spider’s web that moves every hour and you’ve got to stay ahead of it.
"It’s tough, it’s been tough for every window, we’re going into January which will be tough and I think the other thing is that we have Financial Fair Play and we pushed to the limit.
"You talk about the transfer market, the transfer window was tough but remember two weeks before I’ve got to re-sign my manager and I’ve got some big dogs trying to steal our manager, so that had to be dealt with first because if I’m trying to sign a player, if he doesn’t know who my manager’s going to be, he’s not going to make a decision until we’ve got that done. There was a sequence of events, which were a natural process.”
He says the atmosphere at Portman Road has raised eyebrows from visiting clubs up to now.
"Premier League clubs who have been to us thus far this season are surprised. It’s not what they thought, they though, ‘This is little Ipswich’,” he said.
"You can’t tell me that the atmosphere at Portman Road is not better than we witnessed at Manchester City, than we witnessed at West Ham etc. It’s electric.
"And this is the rallying call, we need it. This is going to be absolutely key to keeping us in this division.
"Portman Road has to be a fortress. Not just at the start of the game, at the start of the second half, it’s got to be as noisy again.
"And we’ve got to find ways to really raise the roof, because when Portman Road is rocking, it’s some place.”
Regarding Town’s start, which sees them sitting in 17th, outside the relegation zone by a point but still without a win from their first seven games, he added: "I think the first two games are almost like fantasy football. You get anything out of them and you’ve shocked the world.
"After five minutes, we’re 1-0 up at Man City and I’m thinking, ‘this is [great]’, but actually we just poked the bear.
"The home games, the atmosphere and the performances have been outstanding, we’ve looked like what we are as Ipswich but you’ve got 12 new players falling into a system, learning how Kieran wants them to play.
"We have international breaks, we’ve now got nine away, so Kieran can’t have them every single day as he would have done, so it’s going to take a little bit of time.
"As someone who was at West Bromwich Albion for 16 years, we don’t lose against the Villa, that’s not acceptable.
"We probably should have won the game, their board said to me after the game that they felt they’d got away with that one.
"West Ham was a bad day at the office, I don’t think we’ve had too many of those under Kieran.
"But we’ll do from that and what he always does is he learns. He learns and he adapts, so I’m sure that’s what we’ll do and we’ll go again.
"It’s going to be a tough season and I am utterly convinced this team will be competitive right to the death.
"We’ll go again in January, that’s what we do, but we’re building and we’re learning, we’ve got to do that pretty quickly.”