The UEFA CUP win!

The early 80s was a fun time in the sport in England. This was also a great time in Ipswich for they were becoming a big club. From the late 70s to the early 80s they were one of the better clubs in England. The man in charge of this is Bobby Robson, and if you had seen the start of his managing career, you would haven’t guessed how it ended. Once he hit his stride at Ipswich, he delivered them cups domestically and in Europe.

His first stop was at Fulham, where he lost 21 out of 36. Robson, then moved to Ipswich Town, where for the early part of his tenure Ipswich was a mid table club. Furthermore, they were a side that was fighting amongst each other. Billy Baxter a club legend and captain Tommy Carroll took to making fun of their gaffer. Fortunately for the boss the board, and the chairman had Robson’s back. This spurned him on to make the club into what it became.

What really made this side take off, was the appointment of chief scout Ron Gray in 1970. By 1971 the future club legends started coming in Alan Hunter showed up from Blackburn. The rest of the side was very young, with Mick Mills being only 22 in 1971, George Colin Viljoen, Bryan Hamilton, and Mick Lambert. Because of this talent, in the 1972-73 season they beat Manchester United with Dennis Law and George Best. They also finished fourth securing qualification for European, and winning the Texaco Cup against Norwich.

Ipswich in the 70s became a time for the club where they would make runs in the UEFA Cup, and scare some clubs. The Tractor Boys also made it a habit of beating top sides in the First Division, and in 1972-73 they beat Real Madrid in the first round of the UEFA Cup. Unfortunately, they lost to Lokomotive Leipzig, but the players learned that Europe, while being hard was not beyond their capabilities. The next two years would be the same, runs in the UEFA cup, and losses. Robson’s sides were getting better.

The end of the 70s was a hard time for the club. Near relegations for the club stunted the growth of the side. However, they did make it to an FA Cup final against Arsenal, which the writer of this piece profiled on the site a while back. The early 80s started off really well for the Tractor Boys. They finished third in 1979-80 behind Liverpool and Manchester United, which helped them into the UEFA Cup.

Robson realized after winning the FA Cup, in order to take the next step he would have to change his tactics. He brought in from Holland former Ajax squad player Aaron Muhren and Frans Thijssen. They were both midfielders who could play out wide, and could help Paul Mariner, John Wark, and Alan Brazil. The spine of the team would again come from the youth ranks in Wark, Brazil, Russell Osman, and Terry Butcher. This was the best group of players ever at Ipswich.

The run run up to the UEFA Cup final a two legged affair, during the month of May in 1981, was fun for the supporters. In the first round they played Greek side Aris Saloniki, beating them on aggregate 6-4, even losing the second leg in Greece 3-1. What followed was matches that showed the skill in the side, first dispatching Bohemians 3-1, then taking out Widzew Lodz 5-1.

They took out a great Saint Etienne side with French legend Michel Platini 7-2 on aggregate. This was a great Saint Etienne side, who was at the end of the their great spell in France. In the 70s Saint Etienne was the big club in the league, and they had all the talent. They fell apart in the 1982 when a financial scandal hit the club. To this date they have not reached the heights that they did. The Tractor Boys took out West German club Koln with identical 1-0 wins.

The UEFA Cup final pitted them against AZ of Holland. Robson tended to vary his formation, though he did favor a 4-3-3, but sometimes it would go to a 4-3-1-2. For the first match at Portman Road on May 6th, the Tractor Boys were out to take the advantage and dominated. AZ would not be able to recover. John Wark hammered home the first goal at the half hour mark on a penalty kick. Just after the break a long pass from Gates was headed down by Wark into the path of Thijssen for the 2-0 score line. Then Paul Mariner would make 3-0 in the fifty-fifth minute.

Fourteen days later on the 20th the two clubs met in the second leg of the final at the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam. Away goals would see Ipswich walk aways with the cup. So AZ had to keep the Tractor Boys off the score sheet. Ipswich came in a tad bit nervous but that didn’t last long as Thijssen scored the first away goal four minutes in. Not to be undone, Kurt Welzl, and Kristen Nygaard put two goals in, in the first half hour of the match. Thirty two minutes into the match John Wark put the match away for Ipswich scoring the 14th goal of the tournament, a record that stood for almost fifteen years. Ipswich had the two away goals to keep AZ’s hands off of the cup.

The UEFA Cup win galvanized all the hard work that Robson had put into molding this club into a great side that it became. Ipswich that next year made a push for that league title that they wanted. They came up short missing out by four points. Robson eventually left for the England National team job. This is when the side fell apart, and they have to date never reached the heights they did with Robson. Sir Bobby Robson would go onto have a storied managing career around Europe, and came back to England coaching Newcastle at the end of his career. Ipswich still have the incredible record of never losing a home match in the UEFA CUP.

Stephen C Brandt / Follow on twitter - @StephenCBrandt

Ipswich Town Beat Arsenal

Arsenal tends to lose matches. Sometimes they tend to lose them in big spots where they shouldn’t. The 1978 FA Cup final was one such match where they should have won. Just like with everything at the time, the seventies were weird. There was still some romanticism about the sport still left, and a little club just north of London was going to become the biggest club in the country for a bit, in Nottingham Forest. Liverpool was dominate, Leeds was trying to win everything in sight, and there was a group of players the English National team should have used but didn’t. Oh and the sport was trying to grow in America with a bunch of aging and underrated stars.

Then there was Ipswich Town, which was lead by then Bobby Robson, a former West Brom, and Fulham forward. Robson who had just been sacked at the end of the 1968 calendar year. The following year while scouting for then Chelsea manager Dave Sexton at Portman Road, he bumped into Ipswich Town Director Murray Sangster. He was offered and took the job. In the seasons that followed, the club only finished lower than sixth place once in the First Division. That was the year they beat Arsenal in the FA Cup.

This was one heck of an Arsenal side. They had ex-Newcastle Legend Malcolm MacDonald, Liam Brady, Pat Jennings, David O’Leary, and the ever present Alan Hudson. Many of these players were part of the Double winning side years before, and would go on to be part of a triple FA Cup final set of appearances. MacDonald had played in some memorable FA Cup matches in his time at Newcastle.

Now Ipswich wasn’t a pushover or a minnow. They were a solid First Division club. They had the players and the tactics to stay in the league. This was the time period where Leeds and Forest were great too. However, Ipswich was just another club going about collecting cups. This would be the start of the cup collecting.

In the semi finals both clubs advanced through by scoring three goals on their opponent. Ipswich put three past West Brom’s goalkeeper to win 3-1 at Highbury. Arsenal put three past Leyton Orient’s goalkeeper at Stamford Bridge.

The final should have been a high scoring match. However, it became a defensive match. Ipswich settled down and took the game to Arsenal after the Gunners had a great start getting two corners in the early minutes. The Tractor Boys began to overwhelm the midfield of Arsenal with Liam Brady having a hard time. As he must have not been game fit, as Arsenal manager Terry Neill had to take Brady off in the middle of the second half for Graham Rix.

For all this good work that Ipswich was having, they couldn’t crack the goalmouth. John Wark had two great shots on goal in the second half to only be stopped by Pat Jennings. George Burley also went close too, but couldn’t get the goal to go in either. But finally Roger Osborne’s moment in history would come as Ipswich striker David Geddis faked out most of Arsenal to get the ball up field from the half-way line. Geddis fired it in, to be deflected by Willie Young into the path of Roger Osborne, who calmly put it in the back of the net for the famous 1-0 win.

This would be the last final for Ipswich, they’d make the semi finals again. Years later they’d win the UEFA Cup. Bobby Robson would end up taking the England job before coaching on the continent. At the end of his career he’d come back to England and coach Newcastle, where he is loved. John Wark would end up leaving Portman Road for Liverpool in the 80s. Mick Mills would end his career with Stoke as a player/manager. George Burley would go onto a managerial career, and Paul Mariner would move to the States to finish his career. He coached in Major League Soccer for a bit, and can be seen on ESPN as a pundit.

 Follow on twitter - @StephenCBRandt

Food chains, monsters & the lost boys.

Football is a food chain. If we take off our rose-tinted spectacles and look back through the history books, you soon realise that it always has been, ever since the dawn of the professional game. It is the law of the jungle. Take the legendary Paul Mariner as an example. Chorley fans must have been gutted when they lost their young star striker to Plymouth Argyle in 1973. When I lived in Devon in the 1990s, older fans at Home Park were still bemoaning the day Ipswich came calling in 1976 and they lost one of their cult figures. Despite the argument that when Town sold him to Arsenal in 1984 he had reached the veteran stage of his career, he was still representing England and it was a big loss, by no means the final one, as Bobby Robson’s star-studded side was slowly dismantled. Chorley-Plymouth-Ipswich-Arsenal…a footballing food chain.

We need to remind ourselves that each time we lose a top player, we will be hunting down a replacement equally loved by his current club. As Paul Hurst assembled an initial squad in which seven of the new signings had been bought from lower league clubs, I do not suppose that any Town fan spared a thought for the Peterborough fans who will no longer get to see Gwion Edwards weaving his magic on the wing, or Shrewsbury supporters, stripped of two of their prize assets. All we care about is whether these incoming players will be able to step up to the next level. It is dog-eat-dog out there and we tend to have tunnel vision.

Already there are rumblings about unknown players being signed up. In terms of quantity, I can understand the concern. But in terms of quality? Maybe we have short memories. In recent years, some of the best Town players have been plucked from further down the football pyramid. Give me a Bialkowski, Cresswell, or Mings, over a higher-profile Tamás Priskin or Lee Martin any day. Delve further back and who knew what to expect from the likes of Holland and Walters? There is always a gamble, of course. However, you are more likely to be getting someone hungry to prove himself, rather than an established player in their comfort zone. Hurst’s track record of reigniting playing careers is mightily impressive. He seems to thrive on taking players who started life at big clubs but were discarded and subsequently had to make their way back up the football ladder. The reality with ITFC, as with most EFL clubs is that, as Hurst has wryly observed, ‘We have to shop in a certain market.’ Drawing on his metaphor, Town are shopping in Tesco rather than Waitrose. It could be worse.

The financial food chain is a completely logical reality in the money-mad professional football world. Where I have a problem is the stockpiling of talented young players by clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea. As Martin Calladine – author of The Ugly Game – has pointed out, FFP rules ironically encourage the big clubs to ‘farm’ young talent in vast academies. The full cost of youth development does not count against them in terms of FFP limits, and yet the income from any sales of these development players helps their FFP. This paradox has Calladine wondering whether the PL academies are genuinely there to develop future first team players, or whether they have simply become ‘profit centres’.

What the stockpiling does do is upset the food chain. Recently, the Elite Player Performance Plan system allowed Man City to buy Ipswich’s highly-rated England Youth International Ben Knight. By all accounts, he is one of the most talented teenagers the club has ever produced, yet we will probably never get the chance to see him at Portman Road. Will he make it at City? I hope so, yet there is a fair chance that he will not. After all, their side is not exactly brimming with ex-academy players.


Town’s former Head of Academy Recruitment, Steve McGavin, talked a couple of years ago about ‘mind-blowing’ financial packages being offered by top clubs, even to Under 9 players. Under nines! He went on to state:
‘Unfortunately, with the Premier League, we have created a monster. It’s like a runaway train that no-one knows how to stop. The money at the top end, as we all know, is huge and it’s filtered down into the Premier League academies.’ (EADT, 02/07/2018)

Personally, I do not blame talented kids and their parents for making these moves: the money, the prestige and the facilities on offer… However, we all know what happens in the natural world when the food chain is upset. This ugly, parasitical side to youth football cannot end happily. In addition, there is a more sinister side to it. A recent article in a national newspaper tells the disturbing story of a promising young Sheffield Wednesday teenager who Leicester City tried to sign, unsuccessfully. He has now joined a lower division Belgian club instead. One which happens to be run by the owners of… Leicester City. The Belgian club only had to pay a fraction of the compensation which an English club would have. The journalist inferred that it would not be a surprise if the youngster ends up at Leicester one day. A perfectly legal loophole. No wonder Calladine refers to football as the Ugly Game.

I asked Accrington Stanley’s wonderfully frank owner Andy Holt what he made of the current situation, with top clubs creaming off young talent and then stockpiling these kids. (Calladine notes that, in 2016, Chelsea had a whopping seventy-two ‘development’ players outside their first team squad.) Holt suggested that clubs like Chelsea should be forced to free players they do not use themselves: ‘They’d go for free. Clubs taking them would guarantee playing time. Use them, or let them go to clubs that will. Really simple, player career counts more than club success. Otherwise, there’s a lost generation of players looming.’ (Twitter, 12/08/2018)

I love Holt’s ‘use them or lose them’ idea, however unworkable it might be in reality. Perhaps I am simply yearning for a return to a simpler age, the latter part of the Robson era when the owner and manager were able to nurture and then unleash young talent. Unhindered by the lurking shadow of EPPP and Category 1 status academies. Of course, back then ITFC were a top side, if not a big club. We were high up the order of command. However, the football food chain itself has changed. Today, it is a distinct possibility that the likes of George Burley, John Wark, Alan Brazil and Eric Gates would never have had the opportunity to impress Portman Road crowds as raw teenagers. (Burley marked George Best on his Town debut at Old Trafford as a seventeen-year-old.) Maybe, like Ben Knight, they would have been poached long before then and subsequently sealed away in monster-sized academies in London or the North West. Maybe their careers would never have developed. I find myself returning to Holt’s haunting warning about a Lost Generation. No wonder that Martin Calladine titled his article, ‘Save the Children’. Maybe those young players in academies such as Town’s should be warned to be wary of monsters bearing gifts.

© Rodney Marshall | Follow on twitter - @RodneyMarshall1

Ipswich and NASL

For those who don’t know me, I’m Stephen Brandt. I host Yellowcard Podcast on Tuesday’s in the States at 7pm EST. I’ve written on the history of the sport, all over the world. One of the major themes in my writing has always been the old North American Soccer League. I could do another article on the league, but there’s enough great pieces out there for you. This will be about some of the players who played for Town and in the NASL. 

There’s a theme with the Town players coming over, they seemed to congregate on the Vancouver Whitecaps. No fewer than three players turned out for the Whitecaps: Frans Thijssen, Bruce Twamley, and Trevor Whymark. Vancouver was a very good club, but the connection seemed to allude me, until reading on the Whitecaps page, when they honored Thijssen a few years ago. In the article, Sir Bobby Robson, recommended the city to Frans, since Robson had coached a previous club in the city called the Vancouver Royals in 1968. 

So how did these players do with the Whitecaps, well Thijssen’s career in Vancouver, he spent two seasons: 1983 and 1984, he played 45 matches from the midfield wearing the number 9 jersey, and scored nine goals. He left Vancouver, returning to Holland to see out his career. In 2013 Frans returned to Vancouver for an alumni event, and spent some time with the youth players in the city coaching.

Trevor Whymark played two seasons also in Vancouver, in 1979, and 1980, where he played 57 matches, and scored an amazing 25 goals. He would go back over to the UK, and finish out his career first with Grimsby, then Petersborough, Colchester, and then Diss Town. 

Bruce Twamley was a Canadian playing in the UK, when he wanted to return to his homeland. He returned in 1975 to British Columbia, where he played one year playing 18 times, and scoring two goals. He’d stay in the league to finish his career, bouncing from team to team, first to the Cosmos, then to the Minnesota Kicks, then to Oakland Stompers and finally with the Edmonton Drillers. He’s been a coach in Canada since his retirement. 

To keep up with my podcast or writings, follow me @yellowcardscb 

Next season will be our time to shine

The realistic though of promotion this season has been rather up and down in recent months, with our form taking us out of the playoff positions. But we need to completely ignore this, for the simple fact that, promotion or not, next season will be our time to shine.

I give a huge amount of praise to Mick McCarthy and Terry Connor, who have transformed our club from the threat of relegation to the promotion mix. If we miss promotion this season, next season will be our moment to build on our strengths and to iron out our weaknesses.

Another season in the championship will be challenging, with the Premier League clubs coming down from relegation who will be seeking immediate promotion, as well as the newly promoted League 1 clubs seeking to build a performance as Brentford have this season.

To maintain our squad stability and skill, we must hold on to premier league transfer targets Tyrone Mings and Teddy Bishop, as they have put in a great shift this season, being the creative-minded players that we need to set up and score goals. A bit of investment is needed though, with

Our campaign for promotion has taken a lot of hard work from the players, manager, coaching staff and physios, and it is our duty as fans of the club to praise the hard work they have put in to put us in the position we are in today.

My favourite transfer of the season has to be Kévin Bru, as he’s such a hardworking player and is very talented on the ball - has a lot of talent that we must reward him for! Bru is followed shortly by Bartosz Bialkowski, who has been solid in goal and deserves a lot of praise for quickly fitting in with the team and showing us what a great goalkeeper he is.

Thank you Ipswich Town Football Club for a great 2014-2015 season in the championship, let’s look to the future and see what it holds. I can only be optimistic!