In his weekly press conference today, manager Paul Lambert hinted that there are big changes ahead for Ipswich Town football club. He would not go into much detail except to say that the new moves, which will be revealed shortly, will not only be exciting for the players but also for supporters and the media too!
So what, I wonder, is afoot? We know that life in the division below will mean that the Blues will have to cut their cloth accordingly, and this will inevitably lead to redundancies and a serious thinning of the budget. Financial constraints it seems has forced the club to look at other ways to reinvigorate itself, and this means the end of the loan market as we know it and a far greater reliance on players who are coming through the youth squads.
I would suggest that for the vast majority of Ipswich Town supporters these changes will be greeted as much with relief as anything else. Most of us are sick of these loan deals that lead to very little and stretch the club finances in the process. This season has highlighted so clearly where things can go wrong and no more so that former Town striker Jon Walters, who came back into the side from a Burnley loan deal, only to play one and a half games, get injured, and return to Lancashire for long term treatment – never to be seen in an Ipswich shirt again!
That was as a result of a serious injury, and there have been lots both before and since who have returned to the parent clubs in super quick time. Now I am not suggesting that the players have any control over this, but when a player is drafted into a side, when he has been out of first-team football with his contracted club for some months, it is not too surprising that it happens.
Next season, football agents will be looking elsewhere to make a quick buck – if they have not been doing already, and finally the young guns in the squad will play a major role throughout the season, and the writing is on the wall for some of our contracted players like Grant Ward, who has suffered a long term injury but is quite simply not good enough. Tom Adeyemi and perhaps too Jordan Spence, are also probably considered to be surplus to requirements in Division One.
On the subject of youth having its say, Andre Dozell welcomes the idea and said, There are a lot of young lads who have come through who are all very talented and have shown they can play at Championship level and there are plenty of others on their way as well. It’s obviously up to the gaffer, but I’d love it if there were six or seven of us youngsters in the first team next season.”
Lambert said that Brenner Wolley’s interrogation of him in a post-match interview last Saturday was a “loaded gun”. He told the sports journalist from Radio Suffolk that he knew all about the games that people in the media play, and that all he actually intimated was that if owner Marcus Evans asked him to leave he would not have a problem with it. Otherwise, he is here for the long haul, as originally suggested.
F.W. – editor of Vital Ipswich
