Ipswich Town boss Mick McCarthy says he will sit down and analyse where it`s gone wrong for Ipswich Town football club, after another down-beat performance at Portman Road last night.
Town grabbed a late draw thanks to a strike from Danish defender Jonas Knudsen in injury time to salvage something from what was nothing more than an end of season kick-about.
McCarthy was understandably less than impressed with proceedings but he should be used to it now, as Town have found it difficult to find the net or create any meaningful chances for many weeks in this division sadly.
Sixteen-year-old Andre Dozzell made his full debut while Cole Skuse and Brett Pitman returned to the Town line-up for this one.
Kevin Bru, Kevin Foley and David McGoldrick dropped to the bench, as invention was sacrificed for safety first once again.
It was good to see young Dozzell in a Town shirt from the off though and he started well until for no obvious reason the manager decided to move him and explained afterwards, “I tried to shift him left to try to get him a bit of space and I tried to play him just in front of the two sitters. It didn`t work.’
But as Mick Mills alluded to on Radio Suffolk at half time, Dozzell was doing fine until the switch seemed to unsettle him and he was no longer too sure what he was expected to do and faded out of the game quite suddenly.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Dozzell junior was substituted after 56 minutes but McCarthy was sympathetic afterwards saying, “Look, he`s a 16-year-old kid who came on and had a great debut on Saturday. That doesn`t mean he`s just going to come in and rip it up. We`d have to be playing a lot better than we are to get the best out of him.’
Fulham took the lead on 66 minutes when the visitors counter-attacked down the right and Parker crossed to an unmarked Dembele just inside the box and the 19-year-old Frenchman curled a beauty beyond the outstretched fingertips of Bartosz Bialkowski, who had performed admirably once again throughout the game.
Our Polish keeper was less than impressed with the marking that lead to the goal and expressed his frustration with captain Luke Chambers, who was running back tamely after losing his marker.
The Town goal, in fairness, was a nice move and arguably the only nice move of the entire evening for the Town faithful. Substitute David McGoldrick started it with some deft skills before playing the ball wide to Freddie Sears whose cross found Knudsen in space and he whacked to ball into the middle of the net via the crossbar, giving their keeper no chance.
So what next for The Tractor Boys after this drab draw in front of almost 17,000 supporters of which the best part of 500 were travelling from Fulham?
Mick McCarthy was in a philosophical mood afterwards. ‘We`ll analyse it and have a look at it and see what`s gone wrong, and see why we`ve found it difficult to win at home. Sometimes it is not easy to put your finger on where it is going wrong. If I had an answer to it, I would have stopped it a month ago. It wouldn`t have even started if I had an answer to it!’
All I know is that with or without Mick McCarthy next season things have got to change. Fans will not tolerate another season like this, were the standard of football has been appalling and we appear to be rapidly going backwards.
Marcus Evans has to put up and not just shut up from now on. We are used to experiencing his Howard Hughes moments but we have all had enough of Ian Milne as his jovial mouthpiece, telling us that everything in the Ipswich Town garden is rosy.
It obviously is NOT and these issues have to be addressed without delay – otherwise instead of looking up the table we will all be looking down again and who knows where that may take us?
Frank Weston – editor of Vital Ipswich
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