For Ipswich Town football club, it would mean wiping the slate clean and this could be the best part of the season so far. I mean, it started so well didn’t it and then, for one reason or another, we started to take our foot off the gas. Some might argue that we never really had our foot on the gas, but we accumulated a lot of points, and at one stage sat proudly at the top of the table, five points clear and with two games in hand!
Of course, injuries to key players did not help our cause and nor did some atrocious refereeing decisions which exacerbated the situation further, but there is no excuse for where we find ourselves in the table now and only an annulment of the season as a whole, would vanquish the misery of a season that promised so much but produced so very little.
If we are going to play the blame game then manager Paul Lambert must accept his share of responsibility. After all, he is the manager and he picks the team and when we were in multiple competitions at the start of this campaign, he swapped and changed far too frequently and the end result was a disjointed looking side.
He was also culpable for not knowing the best system to employ and his inability to find a winning formula. Too many Town players seemed unfamiliar in their surroundings, and this was especially apparent in midfield and in defence. Alan Judge remains the endless enigma and where ever the manager chose to play him he seemed to want to do his own thing.
Gwion Edwards was drafted in as a wing-back and with his tenacious tackling in vulnerable areas, he was often found wanting, and the same could be said of Aristote Nsiala and Janoi Donacien. On paper, we had a very strong squad but football, as they say, is not played on paper.
There was another element of the Town make-up that has a damaging impact upon our season. We became woefully short of inspiration. This applied – not only to our strike force but also our midfield, where Jon Nolan, Andre Dozzell and the aforementioned Alan Judge, often looked like fish out of water.
But the main culprit for our sad demise remains the same. Owner Marcus Evans knows naff-all about football and it shows. His parsimonious business brain marinates poorly with the football world. I would have hoped that after more than twelve years at the helm he might have learned something but there is little sign of that and if anything, things have got decidedly worse.
So then, perhaps we should rip this season up and start again and pretend that none of this ever happened. I think I lot of Town fans would be quite content with this particular outcome, and I certainly would.
F.W. – editor of Vital Ipswich
