Don’t Paper Over The Cracks

Another two points dropped, and this time to a relegated club. “What does it matter” I hear you say, and my reply would be lots! It’s a very familiar story which plagued the previous boss Paul Cook at the start of the campaign and is now doing much the same to Kieran McKenna. His win ratio is now below 50% for the first time this season, and in his 22 games in charge, he has drawn seven of them, and most of them very recently.

Drawing 7 from 22 is no disgrace but if you take into account that in his first eight games at the helm, Ipswich either won or lost, the picture changes. The first draw was 0-0 away at MK Dons on the 12th of February. McKenna has had half a season to get things right, but old habits seem to die hard, and now he is struggling with the same problem Cook had. We take the lead but cannot hold onto it.  Worst still, we never look like scoring again. I was not impressed with the team selection today either. OK, both our wing-backs were unavailable due to injury, and although Matt Penney might not have been greatly missed, Wes Burns certainly was! He is an inspirational figure running down the flanks and when he is not in the side, Town never look as effective.

He did not need to shuffle his pack so drastically. Against Wigan, it was arguably our best performance of the season, and yet, McKenna decided to make four changes and in came Kane Vincent-Young, Joe Pigott, James Norwood and Dominic Thompson. Bersant Celina and Macauley Bonne dropped to the bench. A mistake? I think it was. I know this game was very much a dead rubber, but why not try to build on that Latics display – instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And just like Cook, it seems that McKenna is in love with the idea of playing with one upfront. He has done this repeatedly of late, and it is in stark contrast to the way he began his life as Ipswich Town boss. What was so refreshing then was that he experimented with his tactics and formations, and the opposition didn’t have a clue what system he was going to use next? These days he is very much set in his ways, which is a serious cause for concern.

Sometimes we have to face up to the painful truth. We are still not good enough to get out of this division. McKenna has got time on his side, and although he talks about it often, we still cannot take a good corner or a set-piece, and our lack of a serious goal threat continues to be our Achilles heel. Why can’t he fix this? Are we really that poor? We lack fire-power in the final third, and we succumb to sucker-punch late goals too. I still have faith in our manager, but he has to address these issues urgently and that probably means finding a couple of new forwards. They don’t come cheap because they are the most sought after commodity in football, so McKenna must be supported financially by our new owners. He has to hit the ground running next season and revamp the squad again. It won’t need a major overhaul because he can surely see where the fault lines lie.  Failure to address these issues though is guaranteed to make the natives restless, and we don’t want to revisit that dreadful scenario once more.