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Ewood Park memories....
at 14:27 28 Mar 2024

I only go to a couple of games each season, but having been at Portman Road when we beat Nottingham Forest in April 2015 to go back into 6th place with 1 game remaining, I decided that I had to be at Ewood Park the following week to see whether we would clinch our place or miss out. We had 78 points and looked like missing out. So, I drove up from Orpington. One day we’re going to have a huge points total and cruise either into automatic promotion or the top 6.

I felt sick with nerves as the game started, but Daryl Murphy scored early to settle us down. But Blackburn did their bit for the integrity of the league by coming back at us strong and leading 2-1 at half time. Derby were losing 1-0 at home to Reading, so we still had 6th place, but when Blackburn extended their lead, the mood felt grim. I discovered that day though, the thrill of being in a football crowd when good news spreads. Derby went 2-0 down to Reading and the party started in the away end, despite us being 3-1 down. Final score at Pride Park was 3-0 to Reading and our own 3-2 defeat was irrelevant. I remember Luke Chambers being interviewed by Blackburn’s PA man which I thought was a nice guesture and Jordan Rhodes discreetly clapping us as Blackburn did their end of season lap of honour.
I walked away just so pleased that we’d made the play-offs. I think I felt more tense for that Blackburn game than I did about the Norwich matches.
[Post edited 28 Mar 14:28]
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Watching the Match of the Day Ipswich History
at 14:02 26 Mar 2024

Based on the following from In Quest of Glory - Ipswich Town FC under Bobby Robson 1969-82 it took place during Town’s 1-0 win over West Ham on 29 November 1969:

“It was debatable whether this game should have been played on a slippery, icy pitch but for an hour it had everything except goals. Peter Morris came closest to scoring, hitting the bar and heavy snow forced referee David Wallace to suspend play for 20 minutes during the first half. Fortunately, the snow stopped and once the lines had been swept clear, the game resumed with an orange ball. Mick Mills struck the vital blow for Town with a first time shot from 20 yards.”

Ipswich: Best, Carroll, Mills, Morris, Baxter, McNeil, Charlie Woods, Collard, Hill, Viljoen & Lambert.
West Ham (manager Ron Greenwood) Ferguson, Bonds, Lampard, Howe, Stephenson, Moore, Redknapp, Peters, Brooking, Hurst & Best

Goal - MILLS (64)
Referee - Mr D. Wallace (Swindon)
Attendance - 17, 454
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Well done Paul Cook!
at 12:39 25 Mar 2024

I think given Cook’s previous record as a manager and the state of the squad which finished the 20/21 season, it made sense to give Cook the opportunity to reshape the squad. If nothing else, 16 games certainly gave Cook adequate time to assess who he wanted and who he didn’t want.

With the money that was spent for the level we were playing at though, having to wait until September 18 for a first league win in a third tier season - a week after shipping 5 goals at home - was always going to mean Cook was on thin ice. There’s a reason why, as McKenna’s side have carried all before them over the last year and a half, why we haven’t seen Mark Ashton running around the perimeter of a pitch and high-fiving the fans, and that’s because he’s not had to feel the over-riding emotion that was all over his face when he did that at Sincil Bank: intense relief. Finally! We were up and running.
But we weren’t though. And as Town fans, we’d seen the movie before where a takeover happens, money gets spent and we find ourselves stuck in the bottom 8 or lower. It was bad enough when Keane and Jewell did that in the Championship; no way could it be endured in League One.
[Post edited 25 Mar 12:41]
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Well done Paul Cook!
at 10:42 25 Mar 2024

And if Chambers and Skuse had sold on the better players we still had at the end of 2017/18,

if they had signed the players who helped get us relegated and continue to bumble along in mid-table in League One,

if they had been responsible for setting the team up and the style of play,

if they had been the ones coming in to pick fights with the players already here or constantly harking back to past glories they had as a player,

if they had been responsible for club infrastructure and hollowing everything out at all levels of the club…

and if, as is the point of this thread…they had been given control to oversee changing an underperforming playing squad with a budget that was the envy of at least 95% of the other clubs in
the division and instead served up results which saw us no better off than we had been in our previous two seasons in League One, then they’d deserve the levels of venom you consistently display towards them.

Chambers and Skuse were a part of the only good times that Ipswich enjoyed during a 12 years of pretty grisly decline. They had a ringside seat to that decline, but there was some champagne among the gruel. And for that they’ll always be feted.

Paul Cook bungled a wonderful opportunity here. He could inspire neither of the sides he held control over. He performed at the same standard as his unlamented predecessors and has been massively outstripped by his successor.
People want to laud him for the clear out of Summer 2021, fine. It needed to be done. But someone else would have done it if he hadn’t and they may well have made a better job of managing the transition than he did. And his failure to do that is why he should never be thought of as anything particularly special here.
[Post edited 25 Mar 10:51]
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Watching the Match of the Day Ipswich History
at 22:24 24 Mar 2024

No worries if it doesn’t. I watched it so often back in the day that Motty’s narration and the commentaries for every match on there are seared into my mind. It’s great that it’s on YouTube.

It was invaluable at the time as a primer for Town’s ascent under Robson and I’ve subsequently got hold of several books on the era which helped to put all of those matches into full context.

I’d also say that the release of the video itself was very well timed, given that it ends with Town back in the top flight during the good half of the 1992/93 season and Match of the Day back as a regular Saturday night show. There were a number of other similar videos on other clubs that preceded our one which end up petering out with fuzzy footage from goal round-ups during the programme’s Road to Wembley era - nothing to compare with Dozzell burying that header in the bottom corner against Leeds.

Finally, that opening montage with that music still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up now and is begging to be re-edited into a similar montage of McKenna era Town.
[Post edited 24 Mar 22:25]
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Watching the Match of the Day Ipswich History
at 15:21 24 Mar 2024

It was previously released on BBC Video in 1993. I still have my copy, though it did get scrunched up, so I’m not sure how playable it is. My wife has just ordered a new VCR so that she can watch some of her old videos, so maybe I’ll risk it.
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Well done Paul Cook!
at 22:13 23 Mar 2024

What damns Cook here is the way that McKenna got that misfiring, inconsistent but talented squad performing more consistently over the second half of the 2021/22 season. Cook’s reasons for starting from scratch are well known and were justified, but you can’t rip everything up, while behaving like Billy Big Balls in interviews and expect to be taken seriously when results go south and you’re reduced to saying that we should be looking to emulate Rotherham United, after they’ve given your team a footballing lesson.

McKenna came in and could have said, I don’t want to work with this lot, I’ll use my contacts to get half the Man Utd youth team in. But he didn’t. He worked with and coached the players he inherited, all while talking openly and informatively about the game, which was such a refreshing contrast to Cook’s “You’ve seen the game, you don’t need me to explain why we’ve lost at Accrington.”

It’s unfortunate that we were Cook’s one failure, they’ll build a statue of him in Chesterfield I’m sure while he also achieved success at Wigan and Portsmouth. He’s a good manager, who like so many of those Evans hired were incapable of achieving even basic competency when leading our club.
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Big Match Replayed.
at 13:54 23 Mar 2024

The 72/73 theme tune sounds even more like it should be soundtracking a Sid James-led situation comedy.

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Leicester will not be points deducted this season
at 18:40 21 Mar 2024

simply because, as we all know, we never get anything handed to us on a plate.

98 points for automatic promotion as runners up in League One last year, and the same set of circumstances looking possible this year as well. We are always made to earn our prizes the hard way, this will be no different.
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Can I just say that I’m pleased for those of you who go to Portman Road
at 00:45 17 Mar 2024

each week with today’s scoreline.

It’s been a tremendous season, we know, but those of you who are regulars at each home game have had so many 3-2s and 4-3s to thrill and stress you this year. I’m pleased for you - and by extension all of us - that you got to enjoy Town taking someone to the cleaners today, without any stress. In fact, fingers crossed that we click into the same high-scoring winning machine from here on out.
[Post edited 17 Mar 0:46]
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One of the best things about today’s result is
at 17:29 16 Mar 2024

it avoids us having to go through too much introspection as a fanbase during the international break.
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Brandon Williams update in the Broadhead story
at 09:16 9 Mar 2024

May I introduce you to Mr. Tom Adeyemi.
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Ok. How many more points from 10?
at 10:17 6 Mar 2024

All I know is that if we replicate our run from the end of last season, bank on Norwich playing the Cheltenham Town role.
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Bridgen ‘radicalised and captured’ !
at 22:37 2 Mar 2024

If Andrew Bridgen was removed from public life and never seen again, it would be no great loss. He may very well have fallen down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but everything about him over the years suggests that he was always going to be a useful, willing idiot for those theories.

An evil, stupid man who deserves to be cut loose from public discourse.
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1700 go mad in Devon
at 21:59 2 Mar 2024

Absolutely. Am thrilled for him that he’s covering us through this period. 21 years a Town commentator and up until McKenna’s arrival he had maybe 5 decent years to report on. Next season he could be sitting in the commentary positions at Anfield or Old Trafford, which would be quite the change from sitting in an empty Pirelli Stadium just 4 years ago.
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20 Points Ahead of Scum
at 21:48 2 Mar 2024

Agreed. Let’s beat them on 6 April or in the play-offs should it come to it.

I sit here having had a good enough dinner and enough drinks to say that I would happily take us winning on 6 April and then going up automatically, with them winning the play-offs and hostilities resuming as a Premier League fixture.

It’s just unfortunate that I suspect the arrogance they’ve built up over the last decade (Ulla apart) won’t see that wish reciprocated.
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25 points gained from losing positions now.
at 21:56 20 Feb 2024

Just sayin...
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Other posters who it would be nice to see back
at 20:20 16 Feb 2024

Going back a long way, and she wasn't even a Town fan, but does anyone remember the splendidly detailed outside view we used to get about Town from bruxelles_addick?
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Weimann Handball
at 14:13 12 Feb 2024

I don’t mind Goodman, but the other one, Gary Weaver, bugs me so much, that I now watch all our SKY matches on mute, because I don’t want the nerves/tension exacerbated by his verbal diarrhoea.
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Which of these is the most annoying person to be sat near at a game?
at 09:07 12 Feb 2024

I only go to games occasionally, but there was a bloke a few rows ahead of me at Preston, aged about 23, who spent most of the game making banker signs towards the Tom Finney Stand, which from what I could see was populated not with Preston Ultras but rather families and pensioners.
I wonder if he will be at Millwall?

In fairness, I could have qualified for this award at Preston given that my frustrations over the first 10 minutes led me to bellow something potentially actionable at the referee. I wound my neck in after that though.
[Post edited 12 Feb 14:14]
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