Patience Please

Right, forgive the tone of this, but seriously, how can anyone with half a brain say we have problems after two games… yes, you read that right, TWO GAMES!

I’ve been to enough games home and away over the 35 years I have been supporting Town to know that not all of our fans are the sharpest tools, or have the greatest attention to detail (I had to talk a chap through who was who all Blackburn) but one thing that is (or was) in the DNA of all Town fans was ‘patience’.

The Cobbold’s had bags of it, Sheepy had more than enough, Mr. Evans certainly does and more importantly, the fans have it, case in point we pretty much 'tolerated’ Mick McCarthy’s brand to football for 2 years before gently voting with our feet until something was done…Mr. Evans, well actually Mick obliged.

So how is it, when we’ve got what the majority, if not all of us we wanted (I mean did we really want Schteve McClaren or the Cowley brothers here?) I am forced to read Tweets that to the layperson are suggesting the club is playing worse football than in the latter stages of the Mick era, the squad is chock full of the likes of Coke, Douglas and Best to name 3 (there are plenty more) and the squad is too inexperienced etc.

We are 2 games in, one was a draw with 4 new faces, the other a defeat, with effectively 8 new faces where we bossed most of the game, with stats of 63% possession, 15 shots and 12 corners, you tell me when we last did that away from home….I’ll wait!

My favourite Tweet on Saturday evening was  'is Paul Hurst the right man?’ Seriously, talk about lack of patience, in fact, that is just pure stupidity!!

I am not naive that come October if we are losing games, then we maybe need to worry, ever so slightly but are you guys (negative Tweeters/Posters) so clueless that you cannot see the many positives in the recent displays?

To put this simply, in a matter of weeks, actually, scrap that days, Paul Hurst has got a brand new group of hungry, young athletic players, to play a brand of football we saw 3-4 times under Mick in his 5 years, which all of us, including the 'negatives’, were lauding at the time?

The ball is on the floor, we take care of the ball better, we are far more aggressive from the off, home and away, we have actual wingers, certainly one in Edwards and to be fair, we look pretty solid at the back considering that 3 of those lads have never played as a back 4  together and to add to that we have players, some just coming back that we were clamouring for last season in Huws and Bishop, not to mention Dozzell and then we have Downs and Morris, the latter looking particularly useful in his 7 or so minutes v Blackburn.

You have to remember we are notoriously slow starters, under both Burley and Royle we regularly only got going in October, sometimes later…does anyone remember the 2-0 reverse versus Stockport at home in 1997?

I guess, all I am saying is let’s be proper Town fans, show some patience, back the boys and the manager as I predict good things, it might that we this in October, if that is the case, so be it.

COYB.

Follow on twitter - @waynejoshua1976

January Transfer Window 2017.

It’s an exciting time for most clubs when those trying to push for promotion or survival flex their business muscles by bringing in recruits to bolster their squad. That’s what most clubs do, but as ever with Ipswich the feeling is it will be another window that passes the club by and any player that comes in will be broken down to the Mick McCarthy style of play pretty quickly. As ever I hope this isn’t going to be the case, but for almost every season MM has been in charge, not one player has maintained any kind of season after season quality.

So far, 5 days into the window the only business that has been completed by the Tractor Boys is Luke Varney (who was only on a deal until January I believe) has left the club and penned an 18th contract with Burton Albion. For Burton and for Varney I think this is a great deal. Varney who is at the latter stages of his career (not many can keep up the Ibrahimović, Defoe or Totti levels of play as a striker into their later 30s) will be chuffed to have gained another year and a half of wages, and for Burton, he will definitely provided them with goals and a great target man upfront. For a player who had such nasty leg injuries, he has one hell of a leap on him still.

But other than that, no signings are looking to land just yet. Rumours of Danny Ward from Rotherham and Cauley Woodrow from Fulham have been bouncing about, but nothing seemingly solid as yet. In fact, only this morning Town apparently had a bid for Wigan’s Max Power rejected, something that no one saw coming. The biggest problem here being the ‘rejected’ part. So many times over summer and previous windows have Town had bids rejected, it’s becoming the norm for the club. The biggest problem being the amounts of money clubs are asking for players have quadrupled over the last few years, especially since the club last invested ‘big sums of money’ for players. People talk to me about the large sums invested by Keane, but those numbers are fractions compared to players of probably worse standard today! Marcus Evans seems to think he can invest in younger players to develop, but they are going to cost just as much if not more than the experienced players brought in during the Keane years.

So let’s see what happens this January, but I’m not holding out for anything more than the usual loans and maybe, just maybe, the signing on someone like Danny Ward. The biggest worry is if the club DO signed decent players, will Mick be able to get the best out of them? I, along with many others, fear the worst.

Can’t see Mick leaving for a club like Villa? Think again.



Those who think that Mick McCarthy wouldn’t want to leave Ipswich to join a club like Aston Villa because they are in “free fall” are missing one key point. If he were to join them at the end of the season he would be getting a better salary, and even more importantly, be given a huge (by Championship standards) transfer budget to spend over the summer to build a squad capable of an instant return to the Premier League. This alone would be enough to sway him in my opinion.

And do you know what, I wouldn’t blame him if he was offered the job and took it. Imagine how he must be feeling having seen millions come in from selling players over the last couple of seasons and only being able to spend pennies. At the age of 57, he’s probably at the point where he’s only got one more promotion to the Premier League in him if he’s given the right resources, and Villa could well do it next year. Yes they look like a team that will drop even lower down the divisions, but Mick would get that team into shape even as it stands in no time at all.

So in short, if Mick goes anytime soon as far as I’m concerned it’s not because Town need a change, it’s because somewhere else he will be supported the way a manager should be.

(Almost every week I wonder whether Marcus Evans really wants to see this club ever return to the Premiership…)