| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. 15:13 - May 15 with 1107 views | baxterbasics |
..to stay in the Premier League
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2024/05/05/six-things-promoted-ipswich-need
(Just remembered I have a Telegraph 'free trial' currently, here is the text...)
After ending their 22-year absence from the top flight, Ipswich will focus on key areas to ensure their return becomes an extended stay.
After more than two decades, Ipswich Town are back in the Premier League, confirming their promotion with a 2-0 win over Huddersfield. But what do they need to target to extend their stay in the top flight beyond next season?
Keep McKenna
Kieran McKenna has underlined his loyalty to Ipswich after back-to-back promotions, although that is unlikely to stop bigger clubs circling given his achievements in the last two-and-a-half years.
Crystal Palace looked at him before landing Oliver Glasner, while his style of football and the data-driven side of coaching is suited to Brighton, should there be a change of manager. It would be easy to see McKenna’s name discussed in the boardrooms of the clubs at the top of the Premier League.
“That sort of speculation has been around for the last two years, to be honest,” said McKenna. “I’ve shown loyalty to the club through that and I’m really pleased I’ve stuck with it and achieved what we have.
“And there’s still some big, exciting stuff to come for the football club. I’m enjoying the job and focused on this journey so much.”
Loan players
McKenna is set to ask for his loan players to stay at Portman Road after they helped them reach the top flight. Chelsea midfielder Omari Hutchinson has been a standout success in the Championship and looks ready for the Premier League. He has a season left on his deal at Stamford Bridge so a decision will be made on his long-term future this summer.
Kieffer Moore, on loan from Bournemouth, suits the way McKenna plays, while Jeremy Sarmiento from Brighton is an exciting prospect. There are hopes that some could become permanent deals in the same way George Hirst turned his loan from Leicester City into a transfer last summer.
“For sure, it is a special group and [we] had success with that last year keeping the group together and bringing in someone like George after he was on loan and the way he escalated,” said McKenna. “We’ll look at all possibilities to build the squad as strong as we can. The players on loan this season have been an absolute credit to themselves and a really big part of the group.”
Shrewd transfers
McKenna has kept largely the same squad together from League One to the Premier League and it will be a huge step up for some of the players. Sweeping changes to a squad rarely leads to success, while not investing in the right players and letting others go was disastrous for Sheffield United a year ago.
Finding one or two players with Premier League experience will be important in a competitive market for those going up from the Championship.
Fitness
Ipswich players talk about the demands of McKenna in their training, with the foundations of their success built on the training pitches. They will look to match their Premier League opponents for work-rate and then allow their creative players to seize their chances.
“How demanding is he? I’ll tell you one example, we’ve just got promoted and we’re in on Tuesday!” said centre-back Luke Woolfenden.
“But put it this way, we get body-fat tested more than I’ve ever done in the entirety of my career, we run more, we work hard in the gym. Recovery is massive for us and as a group it’s probably the most professional bunch I’ve been around and it’s really helped.
“And like I said, when you work that hard it takes away the nerves and you’re not leaving things to chance.”
Home form
Portman Road created a frenzied atmosphere on Saturday when McKenna’s team sealed automatic promotion. The party will continue next season when clubs turn up in Suffolk, with every match a cup final for fans after a 22-year absence from the Premier League. Making it an intimidating place to travel will be important for survival.
“I know it’s a humongous step up for every department of the football club and will be a massive challenge to be competitive in the Premier League but they are challenges to embrace,” McKenna said.
Share the goals
McKenna has not relied on one striker to get all the goals this season, unlike other clubs such as Leicester (Jamie Vardy, 18 goals), Leeds (Crysencio Summerville, 19 goals) or Southampton (Adam Armstrong, 21 goals). In fact, not a single Ipswich player is in the top 10 list of Championship goal-scorers this season.
“Certainly if someone wants to score 25-plus we’re not going to stop them,” said McKenna. “And the boys have all done terrific to chip in with the goals but, yes, part of our culture is to be a team, as that’s what was going to help us be successful.
“It was to have different ways to score goals and to have different threats in the team. Anyone who has watched us regularly will know part of our strategy is to rotate our forwards throughout the season and through the game. So there aren’t many who play 90 minutes every week.
“But we feel like we have developed our threats and lots of different ways to score goals and that’s been reflected.” |  |
| |  |
| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. on 15:18 - May 15 with 1023 views | J2BLUE |
Must have been a slow news day. |  |
| |
| Also: ‘Every loss at Man Utd was a disaster – but it developed my resilience on 15:18 - May 15 with 1026 views | baxterbasics |
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2023/09/13/kieran-mckenna-interview-ipswich
(13th September 2023)
Exclusive: Ipswich Town manager discusses his attacking principles, injury cutting short his playing career and impressing Jose Mourinho
Kieran McKenna always had a plan. He would be a manager by the age of 35. Why 35? “I mapped that out,” he says. “Mentally in my head that was retirement age as a player. I might have played until I was 35, 36.”
McKenna was appointed by Ipswich Town in December 2021. He was 35 years and seven months old when he succeeded Paul Cook with the club languishing in mid-table League One mediocrity.
McKenna won promotion back to the Championship in his first full season. After five games Ipswich, who have been outside the Premier League for more than two decades, are second, play wonderful, attacking football and the ambition is clear.
As is McKenna’s. “This is a progressive club and I know that I want to manage at the highest level of the game,” he says. “I want to be back to that level - back to the Premier League and manage in the Champions League.”
Spending a day with McKenna is illuminating. Indeed, the fact he invites me to watch a training session, have lunch, watch the Ipswich Under-21s play Coventry City and then devote time to this interview in his office at the training ground is revealing.
McKenna – and Ipswich – want to provide a full picture as to what is going on. For example, the manager does not allow Sky Sports News – the training ground staple – on the televisions in the canteen. Instead there is footage of that day’s training session, always filmed by a drone, or highlights from a recent match. This is to get the message across. Players glance up and what do they see? They see their work and its consequences.
McKenna had two Desso – hybrid grass - pitches installed. He switches the players from one to other in training – with each exercise immaculately set up and organised – to make sure no time is wasted and the tempo remains. Afterwards McKenna, who leads training, and his coaching staff always hold a debrief with senior player, Sone Aluko, joining them.
Aluko, 34, wants to be a manager and he is not alone in the Ipswich squad. “We have 10 of them doing their (Uefa) B-licence,” McKenna says. “There will be some good coaches and managers and that reflects the culture we have here.”
McKenna knows all about that transition, even if it came far too prematurely for him. He was on the verge of the Tottenham Hotspur first-team when his own very promising career as a midfielder ended at the age of 22 due to a chronic hip problem.
McKenna had left his home in County Fermanagh to join Tottenham’s academy aged 16 and went on to play for Northern Ireland at Under-21 level.
“My career was going well but I had almost a two-year spell then of surgery and set-backs and specialists saying I wouldn’t come back,” he explains. “Then I went straight from crutches to coaching and was involved in a group that had Harry Kane, Ryan Mason and Andros Townsend in an outstanding youth team.”
In fact almost since his first day at Spurs he had been marked out as a future manager, firstly by youth-team coach Jimmy Neighbour. Why? “He said I would definitely go on and be a coach and different people have said that over the years,” McKenna explains.
“My work-rate was always really high. I was pretty stand-out in that. I had a passionate love of the game. I loved football, genuinely. I love training every day. Some don’t, I loved it. I worked hard, probably was quite curious around the team and why we were doing certain things, tactical things and then was a good team-mate.”
Indeed later in this interview, McKenna admits he can be “obsessive”. “I work all the time,” he says. “It would be a lie to say anything else and that’s my personality. If I was the club physio I would be the same. If I had any job I would be the same. From being a teenager I was obsessive how I trained and worked hard at everything. It’s in my nature. My parents were the same; my grandfather was the same.”
McKenna’s parents run the Manor House Country hotel, located by Lough Erne to the north of Enniskillen, which they have built up into a venue that is consistently named among Ireland’s best.
“They have the hotel and seeing their work ethic and the huge, huge, huge hours they put into the business - that’s just in me,” McKenna says. “I don’t think that has anything to do with being a young manager. As a youth team coach I was working 14 hours a day in the office and working in the evenings when the kids went to bed, working on Sundays and that has been my pathway.
“The benefit as a manager is that it’s not really been a step up because that’s kind of how it has worked all the way through. If you suddenly start doing that as a manager you are more prone to burn-out. I am not behaving differently.”
McKenna produced his first coaching document when he was 22. It had the details of how he wanted his teams to play, the systems they should use and it has been regularly updated ever since.
“So I have documents that have evolved over the years and then you take notes with the managers you work with and what you see,” McKenna says. “You document your sessions, training, your meetings. I have pretty big databases and have all my training sessions from when I was a youth team coach at Tottenham. I have a drill library of practices and work on the grass I can look back on.”
The obsessive nature; the detailed preparation; the drive to succeed. It begs the obvious question: is McKenna trying to prove himself in football as a manager because he could not do so as a player?
“Certainly not consciously. It’s not something I reflect on too much,” he says, before reflecting on it. “Probably the drive to do really well, the drive to be successful, the drive to make a difference, the drive to make people at home proud of you then there is something un-quenched from a shortened playing career. It doesn’t consciously drive me and part of me thinks I am probably better at coaching than I was at playing.
“But I would certainly swap a lot of games coaching for a few more playing, that’s for sure. The feeling of good days as a player and being involved in victories, there is certainly no better feeling. It’s a different type of satisfaction, intensity and pressure because you are thinking about so many more things (as a manager). But anyone who has made the transition would say there is still nothing better than putting one in the net at the end of a game.”
In 2016, McKenna was poached by Manchester United and the chance to work at the club he grew up supporting – initially as the Under-18s coach – was too good to turn down. He was quickly noticed by Jose Mourinho and when his long-serving assistant Rui Faria left two years later, McKenna moved up to the first-team staff and became even more prominent under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and, briefly, Ralf Rangnick.
“Being at Man United there was massive pressure,” McKenna explains. “Every loss is a disaster and the expectation is really high, the scrutiny is really high and it does develop your resilience, your ability to block out noise, your ability to focus on the things that are important and to control what you can control and not worry about the things outside of that. As a manager at any club that is important. It has helped me a lot.”
At United it was also the first time he had worked with first-team players – some of whom were not just among the biggest names in the game but were older than him.
“I found it pretty comfortable, to be honest,” McKenna says. “Coming in under a legendary manager like Jose was a great experience and a healthy pressure because you want to do well. You want to earn the respect of the manager and the players and make sure the sessions you are taking are ‘on point’. I felt like I was able to do that with every manager I worked under there. Probably one of the biggest things is realising players are not that different whatever level you go to.”
It is a lesson he has taken into management – with Ipswich’s driven American owners, Gamechanger 20, who bought the club in April 2021, taking a punt on McKenna which has been hugely vindicated. In fact, the problem they may now have is holding onto him.
But first he is loving life in the Championship and it is fascinating – and revealing of the level of detail and data he uses - to hear McKenna explain the difference in the “step up” from League One. “Athleticism is better league by league,” he says.
“You go for it from a stats point of view and the Championship is the second or third highest in Europe for sprints and high-speed distance and League One and League Two are the second and third lowest of all the leagues in Europe.
“There is a massive, massive disparity in the physical part of the game and the intensive actions. There is a big step up in ball-in-play time. Average League One ball-in-play time is 48 minutes and first game (in the Championship) against Sunderland we had 67 minutes ball-in-play time.”
There is a pause, before McKenna adds: “We like to be thorough and understand things.”
Not that he has any intention of compromising on a style that yielded 101 goals in League One last season as he showed that teams can play constructive football – and, yes, that means playing it out from the back – at any level.
“My principles are really, really strong and I don’t think I will ever go away from them,” McKenna says. “I believe in trying to play football a certain way. It’s not just about playing out from the back or pressing high. I want my team to be excellent in all aspects.
“We take a lot of time going through the details that might seem minute but over the course of time will add up to making us a much better team. I am steadfast in my principles. I will always want my team to be pro-active to try and dominate games.”
Ipswich are determined to, eventually, return to the top-flight. As is McKenna. It feels like both will happen sooner rather than later. “The ambition of the club is to get back to the Premier League as well so let’s hope that those two paths will cross at the same time,” McKenna says.
“But beyond that I don’t plan too far ahead. It is my responsibility as a manager to pour all my commitment and energy into helping the club. From there the football will take care of itself and it will take you where it takes you.” | |
| |
| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. on 15:24 - May 15 with 914 views | exeterblue10 |
Thanks for sharing that - good read |  | | |
| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. on 15:27 - May 15 with 881 views | burnbudgiesburn |
| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. on 15:24 - May 15 by exeterblue10 |
Thanks for sharing that - good read |
Although the first 2 things that we 'need to do' in that list are in reality out of our hands. | | | |
| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. on 15:27 - May 15 with 886 views | Oldsmoker |
Surprised the article didn't mention Town were the leagues top scorers when they said not one of our players was one of the top 10 goalscorers.
They are equal 7th with Newcastle on 92 goals in the all-time list. |  |
| |
| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. on 15:28 - May 15 with 880 views | SitfcB |
| Telegraph: Six things Ipswich need to do.. on 15:18 - May 15 by J2BLUE |
Must have been a slow news day. |
Tbf it’s from last Sunday/Monday. [Post edited 15 May 15:28]
|  |
| |
| |
By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions.
