| Psychology of expectation 08:04 - Mar 11 with 449 views | bsw72 |
It has become a familiar view among supporters this season.
The current squad is, on paper, the most expensively assembled in the Championship, yet it does not feel like the team that won back-to-back promotions, and the honest answer is that it probably never will.
That is not purely a criticism of the players brought in, it is simply a reflection of where this group has come from and what it has been asked to do. You cannot directly compare a side built from scratch on belief, momentum and a clear identity with one that has been largely reconstructed after a bruising Premier League relegation. They are different animals entirely, shaped by very different circumstances.
There is something fundamentally different about a team that rises without expectation and one that falls carrying the weight of obligation. Ipswich, perhaps uniquely in recent English football, have lived both experiences within the space of three seasons.
In 2023, we arrived in the Championship as a League One club that nobody outside Suffolk gave a serious thought to. No immediate history bearing down on them, no pundits tipping them for the top six, no parachute payments softening the landing. Just a group of players who believed in what they were building and had nothing to prove to anyone outside the dressing room. That kind of freedom is rarer than it sounds, and it is extraordinarily powerful. Back-to-back promotions followed, making us only the fifth team in history to achieve that feat; ending a 22-year absence from the top flight.
The Premier League season was generally a pretty horrible experience. We spent most of it in the bottom third of the table. One season. Back down. The players who had carried us there, Morsy, Chaplin, Broadhead, Luongo, were gone or on their way out. A squad that had been built over the prior 3 yeats was dismantled and a new squad was assembled.
What made it harder was the tag we carried back into the Championship. Installed immediately as promotion favourites, we stumbled through the first four games without a win, still trying to knit together the group of new faces.
Being the favourite sounds like a privilege. In reality it just means every poor result gets magnified and every dropped point feels like a crisis.
McKenna has been honest about where we are. “There’s been a big turnover. We had a brilliant team. Now we’re trying to build another one. That’s the journey that we’re on. It’s not an easy journey.” Not sure how many of us really listened to what he was trying to say when he made those comments.
Gradually it has started to come together, but something has not quite clicked and I think a lot of is down to the weight of expectation this new team carries with players not used to having that tag. Now we still have a chance of automatic promotion but the run-in is brutal. Five rearranged fixtures across the season have left us staring down eight games in 27 days to close the campaign, five of them away from Portman Road.
The contrast with 2023 is stark. That team fed off momentum and the sheer joy of exceeding expectations. This one has to dig deeper, grinding out results under pressure, with a squad still finding its rhythm, against opponents who would love nothing more than to derail the favourites.
Whether McKenna can get us over the line this time will say as much about the culture he has built at Portman Road as the two promotions that came before it. The journey was always going to be harder the second time around. |  | | |  |
| Psychology of expectation on 08:14 - Mar 11 with 396 views | TownieRob |
This is a great post and a really good reflection on the last few seasons. I agree with a lot of it. The one question I always come back to when people and KMs talk about 'building a new team' is whether it needed to be done in the way it was.
I completely understand that the PL would have exposed areas where we needed to improve, and some change was inevitable but I do sometimes wonder if we moved too quickly and too heavily in dismantling what had been built. The reality is that we weren’t going to stay in the PL last season, regardless of what we did in the market, therefore we might not have been any worse off if we had approached it in a more measured way, keeping more of the core that got us there and evolving the squad gradually. Att times it felt like the money was burning a hole in our pocket once we went up, and the thinking perhaps became that spending big would naturally keep us there or get us straight back up.
As you have stated, the thing that got us to the PL in the first place wasn’t money, it was the belief, momentum and a very clear identity. Those things are much harder to buy.
It’s not necessarily a criticism of the players who have come in, but it does feel like we have lost everything made that original group so special. |  | | |
| Psychology of expectation on 09:56 - Mar 11 with 289 views | Guthrum |
An important comparison is going back to the very genesis of the double promotion team, in the aftermath of wholesale changes and much transfer spending in the summer of 2021.
Down in League One, Paul Cook in charge. A very poor start, no win until 18th September. Then an awful lot of toothless dross interspersed with occasional flashes of brilliance (Doncaster H, Portsmouth A, Wycombe A). The terrible cup games. Cook is sacked. We don't win under McGreal. McKenna takes over. Performances improve, our defence becomes less leaky, but we still can't score. Lots of draws, we finish 11th.
That is where the double-promotion team came from. They didn't start with the brilliant first three months of 2022-23. I doubt we'd have achieved what we did that season without the one before, to get key players established and iron out some wrinkles. |  |
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