Ipswich Town keeps breaking records. It is now eight clean sheets in a row and seven wins on the bounce! I am not one to employ superlative abuse but I have to say that it is a truly incredible achievement to have scored 20 goals without reply, and I doubt whether there is another club anywhere that is participating in domestic competition in Europe that could equal it. It has been a remarkable turnaround in our fortunes.
We rode our luck a little against Derby County yesterday because I saw nothing wrong with their equaliser which was almost immediately chalked off. That said if we can believe that over a season things level themselves out then we are due some luck because, in the first half of the season, a lot of decisions went against us. Michael Smith’s late leveler for Sheffield Wednesday was clearly offside Marcus Harness scored a perfectly good goal against Barnsley but it counted for nothing in the end.
Our two Welsh internationals may not have been on the scoresheet at Pride Park but they were the architects of both goals. Nathan Broadhead is playing brilliantly these days and Wes Burns has refound some of his best form of late. That first goal was a classic counter-strike and if I have one complaint about Christian Walton, it’s that he is too slow releasing the ball but it was his quick thinking that got the ball rolling and Nathan Broadhead’s wonderfully incisive through ball found the head of Burns who expertly headed downwards for Chaplin to score. It was a goal fit for the Premier!
We are now just two points off both Plymouth and Sheffield Wednesday, and we have a game in hand on the Owls, so the ball is finally in our court again! Three of the next four matches are at fortress Portman Road so we must try to sustain this extraordinary momentum. I cannot recall a season quite like this. It is truly mind-boggling and let’s not forget, Barnsley are not out of it either, so I think this fight for those two automatic promotion places will go right to the wire. We will take some stopping now though. Our confidence must be sky-high, and we are the ones that have the momentum!
