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O Brave New World
Written by Tristan90 on Friday, 16th Aug 2024 18:18

I'm not a regular contributor to TWTD but, in February 2021, after watching a very drab 0-0 home draw with Northampton Town in an empty Portman Road, I wrote a blog entitled 'Something Rotten' based on a line uttered by Marcellus, rather a bit-part character in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'.

I made the following points then and I think that they're worth revisiting now:

"Ipswich Town is a club with problems. Big, deep-rooted, festering problems. Problems that have been half-addressed, glossed over, circumvented or, with admirable sleight of hand, hidden behind an apparently brighter facade and a lick of paint all too often.'

"Fundamental change is required at Ipswich Town. It needs to start with the manager, continue through the structures of the club - a real football person with their own mind in a position of power, anyone? - and, ideally, end in the boardroom.

"Will it happen? Who knows but one thing that has come out of the Lambert era, now surely in its dying days, is the laying bare of certain truths: the club is rotten but the support base and passion are there. With the right decisions, all is not lost."

Did it happen? Yes, and then some. Kieran McKenna is the best young manager in the world (the omission of arguably or possibly there is absolutely deliberate) and was voted the best in the country by his peers.

Mark Ashton is that real football person with his own mind. The boardroom not only includes Mr Ashton but the genuinely game-changing Gamechanger and, as of this week, a genuinely global megastar.

Football fans have to be optimists but I don't think any of us could really have imagined what was to come, particularly after Paul Lambert was replaced by Paul Cook.

It is for stories like the one that we're currently living as Ipswich fans that supporters wearing the colours of all clubs make their weekly pilgrimages; we are no longer the tale of the has-beens but we are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Not only was all not lost but so, so much was found - or rather rediscovered - along the way. Our club has been resurrected in the most dramatic way possible. Tomorrow will be the first time I have ever seen Ipswich Town play in the Premier League - my first game was a 2-1 home defeat to Bradford City the September after our last relegation - and I am excited about that but I am going into it - we all are - off the back of two seasons of euphoria.

193 league goals. 10 league defeats. Two promotions. "Sarmiento...even for the Championship, this is extraordinary!". It's been genuinely magical. It feels like the sort of thing that you watch happening to other clubs, feel jealous and then drive to Burton to see a speculative shot clear the roof of the stand.

The new signings are incredible. The fact that we're suddenly being talked about all over the place is incredible. That, tomorrow night, Ipswich Town are going to be on Match of the Day not as a 90-second section of a 'highlights package' following a Cup defeat at Accrington but as a full-blown, analysed, yellow circles and imaginary arrows Premier League team is incredible. The transformation of our club is beyond even the most optimistic Aspall-fuelled positive thinking.

There is much to be said about tactics and signings and all the technical stuff and I'll be sure to have an opinion on these as the season develops but I'll leave the analysis of all of that to the better-informed than me at a better time than now. For me, today and the inevitable buzz of the build up in the town tomorrow morning is all about feelings not tactics, about our club as a whole rather than our prospective results because what is a club in any case? The noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride. It is that that will define our matchday experience tomorrow: at least it will mine.

I chose Marcellus not just because of his "something rotten" insight but because, despite all the evidence suggesting that he shouldn't, he followed Hamlet anyway. I said in 2021 that "Hamlet was mad to follow that ghost and Marcellus was mad to go with him but hope and loyalty are impossible to ignore; I will continue to follow that ill-defined apparition in the distance in the hope that it is not a ghost but a figure who merits the crown and stick to the belief that, "though this be madness, there is yet method in it"."

Following Ipswich Town around the country, driving 160 miles of the A14 every other Saturday and all the rest of it seemed increasingly like madness for many years but, for the last two years, it's been the best kind of madness. The figures on the pitch, in the dug-out and in the boardroom do merit the crown. The time is no longer some hazy, distant hope, some apparition just out of sight, but it is real and it is now.

Looking at our new signings, our promotion heroes, our Chairman, our manager and the 30,000 others in blue and white and full voice and anticipating the enormous Suffolk roar as Ipswich Town and Liverpool enter the pitch as the curtain is raised on our Premier League adventures, I turn away from Hamlet and towards one of my favourite of Shakespeare's characters.

After infighting, acrimonious relationships and self-centred usurpers selling out an historic dukedom for short-term personal gain leading to years in the wilderness, 'The Tempest' ends with hope, reconciliation and a restoration of things to how they should be and Miranda looks at the assembled crowd and proclaims 'O brave new world that has such people in it'.

Ipswich Town has been restored. The club, the town and the fans have been reconciled and the crown is on the head of one who merits it. Brave new world, indeed.

Uppa Towen.




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Rsj13 added 01:46 - Aug 17
One of the best written and emotive blogs I've seen here. Great piece.
3

dusth added 11:40 - Aug 17
So god and spot on.
2

dusth added 11:40 - Aug 17
Good
2

Churchman added 06:58 - Aug 18
This blog captured the seismic change in the fortunes of Ipswich Town and all who follow the club really well.

It really is (for me anyway) hard to comprehend the change from hopelessness of early 2021 to Liverpool at home in a league game.
1

jalapenosteve added 13:22 - Aug 21
Great post! And yeah, this season let's be successful in the battles that we fight (per Titus Andronicus or was it Titus Bramble?...)
1
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