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Reply | Will you be disappointed…
at 08:46 23 Apr 2024
Yes, but…
…probably in the same way I was disappointed that I missed out on a First at Uni by less than 1%.
The immediate sense of disappointment was soon replaced by pride, satisfaction and ultimately a logical understanding of where I fell short (in Town’s case it will be playing 5-6 games without a centre forward after Hirst went down*).
For Town this season, even if they don’t win another point, it’s objectively been an incredible performance - both on and off the field; and once the initial pain has subsided no one could look back at this season with anything other than overwhelming pride. We’ve got our club back, we stand for something and we can go again.
*Not a dig at Jackson, I think he’s a reasonable back up for the right wing - he’s just not a centre forward. |
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Reply | Least disliked team from each division
at 05:51 19 Apr 2024
The first two are because my wife grew up between Newcastle and Sunderland and in her extended there are fans of both teams so I always hope (as long as it's not to the detriment of Town) that they do well.
EPL: Newcastle
Champ: Sunderland
L1: Barnsley - class set of fans at the play-off final
L2: Barrow - my best friend when I was in the UK was from there and a huge fan. I've been to many a non-league game in Essex and London with him to cheer them on. Any fans that do the miles they do deserve credit. I did not enjoy the FA Cup loss to them one bit though - my mate was not a 'class fan' that day!!!
Scotland: Hearts (been my scottish side since I was a kid and I have no recollection why - maybe because I'd never seen a team play in purple before??) |
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Reply | Who is, or was, the best footballer on here.......?
at 00:25 12 Apr 2024
Was a pacy right-winger when I was 12/13 years old and got into the Suffolk U-14 squad but didn’t quite make the team.
Lost a bit of pace and converted to a full back and at U-16 level played locally for Ipswich Exiles in a year when we went undefeated and won every trophy available. Played 3-4 times for their adult team as a 16 year old.
Missed the whole season when 17 due to first a fractured metatarsal and then broken wrist - the latter when playing 5-a-side two weeks after getting the all clear on my foot injury.
Went to one of the biggest unis in the country at 18 and there were about 600 lads trying out for four teams. Got selected and played four years in the 2nd XI. As others have said, top end uni football is a pretty high standard with most of the 1st XI having played in professional academies as teenagers.
Moved to West London after I graduated and started to train with Hanwell Town who were then in the London League (I think Tier 9 in the football pyramid) but my job meant I was away a lot during the week and they wouldn’t sign me because of ‘commitment issues’. Pretty much stopped playing then because the working away meant lots of hotel breakfasts and evening beers paid for by my employer and that wasn’t really conducive to decent level sports!! |
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Reply | What’s the single biggest reason you want us to go up?
at 15:59 9 Apr 2024
Undoubtedly there are some downsides - but if we are actually now run by people who know what they’re doing then it’s the next step in establishing ourselves in the group of clubs who regularly finish 10th-15th and to potentially push for the bottom end of the European spots. Plus a greater chance that we could snag an FA or League Cup (I’d quite like the latter because it would give us the full set).
Worst case scenario is we get relegated straight back with a lot more $$$ behind us. Just as long as we don’t overreach like Leicester, Forest and Everton have done. |
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Reply | Anyone been to Ubud
at 05:48 21 Mar 2024
The Aussie Rules and Aussie Rugby League matches should all finished by the time of kick off - but would comment that sports bar and Ubud do not obviously go hand in hand - and its not exactly easy to pop down to Seminyak where the chances are greater.
You might need to sign up to a month's pass for an international subscription on TownTV if you do want to watch it? |
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Reply | Burgess vs. Blackburn
at 09:30 20 Mar 2024
The game will finish at about 10pm local time in Canberra. You can't fly back to Europe from Canberra, and the last flight out of Canberra to Sydney is about 8pm. Which means he would at earliest be on the first flight out in the morning at 6am - by which time he's probably only had 3-4 hours sleep max.
Get into Sydney around 7:30am Wednesday but by then the morning flights to Europe will have all departed. The next wave of European departures will be about 1-2pm Sydney time - which gets him into London around 6-7am Thursday (UK time). Then has to trek around the M25 back to Ipswich - unless he flies Emirates and can come into Stansted instead of Heathrow; but even so he won't be back to Ipswich until about 10am.
At that point he will have been travelling for about 36 hours having only had 3-4 hours sleep on the Tuesday night - I suspect the last thing we would do is then chuck him on a 5 hour coach trip up to Lancashire (assuming we travel up on the Thursday).
Even if the Australian FA or ITFC stump up for business class travel and lounge access at Singapore/Dubai he'll be exhausted and sore.
Not forgetting the fact that at 6ft5in tall even the best business class setup will be pretty cramped.
The only possible option really is to fly him back to Manchester from Sydney - which would see him land there at about 9-10am on Thursday - but I can't see us taking the risk when we have Fridge or Axel who could step in. |
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Reply | Jackson....
at 23:54 16 Mar 2024
So pleased for him.
His single biggest issue is he was sold to the fans as a centre forward and if we judge him in that (including as the stop gap between Hirst and Moore) - he’s clearly not up to this level,
But as a right winger, he a more than capable back up and he showed this again yesterday. I was very happy with him coming on to replace Burns but if he’d come on to replace Moore I would have been shaking my head. |
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Reply | Omari
at 23:47 16 Mar 2024
He’s certainly one of the best and only Lawrence comes close in the Evans/Gamechanger eras (Celina had his moments, but Lawrence and Hutchinson have won us multiple games over the season).
It’s hard to judge him against the likes of Magilton, Reuser, Murphy, McGoldrick and Kuqi because we signed them after the loan and so what they mean to us is amplified by what they did once they became permanent players. |
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Thread | Uncanny resemblance to Wrexham/Sunderland series...
at 02:32 15 Mar 2024
I finally managed to catch Season 3 of Sunderland Til I Die over the last couple of weeks - but given it had been 3-4 years since Season 2 I went back and watched Seasons 1 and 2 again.
It's really uncanny how if you watched Season 1 and 2 of Sunderland Til I Die and then went into Season 2 of Welcome to Wrexham - it would almost perfectly mirror the experience of following Ipswich over the 2018-2023 period.
From the despair of falling out of the Championship with an ageing team and an owner who didn't give two sh1ts (STID S1), to thinking jumping back would be easy only to discover the purgatory of getting stuck in League 1 (STID S2), then moving into the euphoria of new American owners, smashing the league with record goals scored, but still not securing promotion until the penultimate weekend (WTW S2). Plus add in the association with a global celebrity - it's uncanny.
And it's quite probable that Season 3 of Welcome to Wrexham will mirror our season this year with them having bounced around the top four of League 2 all year and still now in with a shout of back to back promotions.
The only thing that our journey is missing in comparison is the sheer incompetence of the new Sunderland owners in Season 2 of STID - although some of the Lambert reign had similarities (great initial fan engagement/PR followed up by sh1te on the pitch).
So many times I've watched both series and thought - yup, been there, experienced the same. |
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Reply | Of the three teams we are competing with
at 09:14 14 Mar 2024
A hard one for me.
- Leeds: I studied there and have this conflicted view that I love the city, support Yorkshire at Cricket and Leeds in the Rugby - but never fully warmed to Leeds Utd; but equally I don't hate them in the way many do. I also think they are by far the best team we've played and are really the only set of fans who can say their team is better than ours.
- Southampton: Never really been a fan of the team and the fans got a bit chirpy when they were on that good run - plus there's the whole Russell Martin being a budgie legend that also counts against them.
- Leicester: Their fans have been assuming they're going to be promoted since about October, so it would be funny as f*** if they stuffed it up from here. Now the whole financial fair play has reared its head.
So on balance I think I'd prefer Leeds and Ipswich go up automatically and Southampton/West Brom beat Leicester in the play-offs. |
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Reply | A few threads today have had me thinking
at 08:55 14 Mar 2024
This.
Charlton have had four owners in the last 8 years - all of them abject and none of them with Evans' cash reserves. Even if crowds had dropped down to 11/12k each week like Charlton have this season then we would still have been drawing in much more revenue than most of League 1.
I think some responses are over dramatic. I think the chances us of ever getting out of League 1 with Evans in charge would have been tiny - but it would have taken something cataclysmic for us to drop in to League 2 - and Evans' last few years, whilst abject, were not at that level. He may have lost interest but he wasn't about to let his investment crumble to nothing. As bad a decision as it was - a 5 year contract for the type of money an internationally experienced ex-Premier league manager would have commanded shows he was still had the intent to invest. |
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Reply | Help please - how can I watch today's game in Australia?
at 10:30 9 Mar 2024
The non-VPN option in Australia is Bein Sports. You might be able to sign up to a free trial - but then it’s $16 a month (about £9).
Hope you’re enjoying Perth - it’s cooled down to 27/28c from over 40c a couple of weeks ago. |
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Thread | Further parallels with last season
at 04:39 7 Mar 2024
Given the striking similarities with last season (form slump in January, four losses at end of Feb, more than two teams on track for around 100 points)...
...what are the chances that Norwich (A), Coventry (A) and Hull (A) end up mirroring our performances and results of Derby (A), Peterborough (A) and Barnsley (A) last year?
Games where everyone (including our fans) predict they could end our non-losing streak but in the end they are the cherry on the cake of our triumphant promotion. |
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Reply | Brenner
at 22:24 6 Mar 2024
Clearly not a Town fan, just listen to how excited he gets when Bristol score compared to his flat delivery when we score. 🙄 |
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Reply | This is a beautiful feeling.
at 23:24 5 Mar 2024
100% with you on this.
Moved down under 10 years ago, but had long before that stopped being interested in football - other than Town. Fell out of love with the Premier League in the late 2000s, never watched the Champions League and even England started to bore me.
By 2019/2020 I was still watching Town games whenever I could, but it felt like a duty rather than something I really looked forward to. The chances of me getting up at 3:30am to watch a midweek game against Bristol City would have been next to zero.
Fast forward to today and I’m bouncing around my living room at 5am like a child the night before Christmas.
No matter how this season finishes, my love has been renewed. I bl00dy love this football club. |
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Reply | So just to confirm other teams think we are
at 09:08 5 Mar 2024
Yup - the Sunderland forum on the day we beat them to the Kieffer Moore loan was full of their fans saying we were breaching FFP and if we don't go up this year we are financially f***ed. Only a couple of their fans pointed out we were 16th in the league in terms of wage bill - but don't let that get in the way of a good narrative.
Oh - and to add one more from the weekend - Josh Smith is clearly on our payroll and has reffed us six times for no losses. |
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Reply | Are we ?
at 09:05 5 Mar 2024
There's a bit of history to this with Plymouth.
In one of the League 1 games at their place (either early last season or late the season before) Morsy did commit a pretty awful tackle - late and over the top of the ball. Much worse than Galloway's tackle at the weekend and to be honest was one of those ones where if there had been VAR he would almost certainly have got a red card for it. (Quite out of character for Morsy - he's a yellow card accumulator but this is the only time where I think he went beyond that)
Add to that their belief that Edmondson's tackle in the game at Portman Rd was a clear foul and red card (ignoring the replays that showed he got the ball) and now the collective hive mind on their forum has come to the conclusion that we are a dirty side and that Morsy is the dirtiest player in the history of the modern game.
And then on Saturday there were two other factors to add to this:
1) That their players fell over at the slightest contact - even from someone as lightweight as Hutchinson - and the ref constantly blew up for a foul.
2) That Morsy was paired with Travis - a player who the Blackburn fans told us was a black belt in 'sh1thousery'...and for the first time I saw what they meant because he was winding them up left, right and centre.
Are we a dirty side - not really, and the fact we've had no red cards against us would be testament to that.
Are we much much better at the dark art of niggly fouls than we were 2-3 years ago - 100% and thank god for that.
Plus - the fact that our niggly players (Morsy, Hirst, Chaplin, Moore, Luongo) are also technically very skilled players means we are not only capable of disrupting the opposition, but also of then passing around them. |
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Reply | Hypothetically Speaking…
at 04:57 5 Mar 2024
No - f***'em.
They've finished above us for 12 of the last 13 seasons (only exception was 17/18) and 15 out of 21 seasons since we were last in the Premier League.
If we both go up, then it's a chance they finish above us next year.
I'd happily not break our non-winning streak against them for another 10 years if that means we spend the next 10 years in a league above them.
It's an embarrassment that in their last stint in the Premier League they overtook us for the total number of top-flight games (they have now played 8 games more than us in the top division) - it's their time to be the second team in Anglia again. |
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Reply | Moore
at 04:35 27 Feb 2024
Different players but both serve the same purpose in our system which is to regularly occupy both opposition centre halves and therefore create space for the three other attacking players to move into.
Hirst does it through his mobility and aggressiveness, Moore does it by being an existential threat due to his size, plus he is also quite mobile.
Before we signed Moore we had Jackson running his socks off like Hirst but without applying any pressure on the centre halves; or Freddie who despite being a big unit never occupied more than one centre half - which is why neither could give the team setup what it needed in terms of creating space for the others.
It's no surprise we're scoring for fun again now that Moore is getting the two centre halves out of position in the same way that Hirst does - and no surprise that the goals are coming mostly from the three players sitting just behind the striker.
The third goal at the weekend was the epitome of this - Moore took both centre halves out of the game with his positioning and then the quality of his flick on and Hutchison had a free run at goal.
I'd happily sign Moore in the summer because what Hirst's injury has shown us is that we are so reliant on the number 9 performing that function. Also, with the way McKenna freshens up the forwards with his substitutes can you imagine what a threat it will be to take Moore off after 65/70 minutes to then have Hirst come on (or vice versa). And the beauty of this loan is that we now know both can make McKenna's preferred system work. |
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Reply | Crowds
at 04:17 27 Feb 2024
That's the main reason I would have thought.
When the Pioneer Stand opened in 1982 the block in the upper tier next to the tunnel was the 'family enclosure' and it was really the first time that mums and younger kids would have somewhere to go. Whereas Churchmans and the North Stand were all standing and whilst a lot of fun I can't think very appealing to the family market.
My Dad used to stand in Churchmans and when me and my brother started going (around age 7/8 in the late 70s) he used to plonk us right at the front behind the goal with our milk crates and told us not to move and he'd see us at half time and full time. |
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