Seven years have passed since Ipswich Town finished an East Anglian derby in the ascendancy. Before Sunday afternoon, their most recent six meetings with Norwich had brought five defeats; one a 5-1 embarrassment at Portman Road and another granting their rivals passage to the 2014-15 play‑off final. A well-deserved draw this time did something to stop the rot but 14 years in the Championship have bred a slow-burning unease among their support and is a fact not lost on Mick McCarthy, whose side was warmly applauded off the Portman Road pitch.
Objectively, McCarthy has done a fine job on straitened resources. Ipswich increasingly resemble an analogue operation in a fast-moving Championship that is in danger of moving in two distinct streams. Sixth and seventh-placed finishes in successive years have been more than reasonable on the face of it, but discord about the team’s style accompanied a sharp decline in the second half of 2015‑16 and the opprobrium grew louder after a limp 2-0 defeat at Brentford the previous Saturday.
Ipswich were neither passive nor agricultural against their local rivals and McCarthy was certainly forthcoming after the game when asked if their performance would have eased fans’ concerns.
“I get sick to death,” he said. “We play one bad half [at Brentford] and we’re all shit and can’t play. ‘The manager doesn’t care, get somebody who cares,’ I’m ‘a boring cunt’ – somebody called me that last week. I wish they would say it to my face on my own because his pint of lager, he’d have been wearing it.
“Let me tell you, if that’s what they think about me and my team then they are sadly mistaken. I’m not having that and it does hurt me. Up and down like a bloody fiddler’s elbow – I’m all right one week but I’m not the next.”
It is as much a wider symptom of the times than an indictment of Ipswich’s stasis but there was enough here to encourage the doubters. Ipswich tore into Norwich from the first whistle and should have been awarded a goal within two minutes when Jonathan Douglas stabbed a loose ball past Michael McGovern. Offside was given; replays suggested Douglas was level with the last defender and McCarthy was prepared to steer his frustration in a different direction upon reviewing the decision.
“If that is the case then I’ll be battering PGMOL’s door down again on Monday morning with a tirade of: ‘Hey, any chance of us getting a decision?’” he said of Professional Game Match Officials Limited. “No I won’t – I’ll be doing it tonight on their answering machine.”
Ipswich had been denied another legitimate-looking goal in their midweek draw at Wolves. Their luck appeared to be comprehensively out in the 26th minute when Norwich, hitherto pegged back, constructed a move that hinted at their residual Premier League quality. Ivo Pinto, beating Freddie Sears too easily on the right, cut the ball back for a quick exchange of passes between Jonny Howson, Wes Hoolahan and Cameron Jerome, the latter finishing crisply to Bartosz Bialkowski’s right from 18 yards.
The smart money at that point was on Norwich making their technical advantage count; they controlled possession for the rest of the first half and more of the same appeared likely until, with the interval looming, the Ipswich left-back Jonas Knudsen equalised with a fizzing low drive of his own. Knudsen’s right foot is generally used for little more than the proverbial; this time, after Norwich had failed to defend a long throw correctly, he had enough trust in its ability to let fly from outside the area and restore parity.
“I didn’t buy him for that,” McCarthy said. “It’s akin to my left foot. He does all the shitty jobs, gets up and down, so it’s nice for him to get some love for scoring against Norwich.”
The Ipswich substitute Teddy Bishop might have done the same towards the end of the tense second half, but Norwich had the clearer late chances. Their own replacement, Steven Whittaker, had one effort cleared off the line and struck a post with another; on balance nobody at Portman Road could complain and the visitors’ manager, Alex Neil, was of similar mind.
“I don’t think we did enough to win it,” he said. “We probably had the best chances, but I don’t think we moved the ball quickly enough. It’s a rubbish goal for us to concede, we had a chance to score a second and within 45 seconds it comes from a throw-in we haven’t set up for. I’m really frustrated with that.”
McCarthy would probably settle for Neil’s frustrations. Norwich, he believes, will be among the leading pack for the remainder of the season and despite their frayed edges here it is hard to disagree. If this morsel of encouragement galvanises Ipswich into a run of form, meanwhile, he should be able to enjoy a more consistent reception from his public.
Talking points
If you were, to put it Jarvis Cocker’s way, fully grown in the year 2000 then the following will make you feel decidedly old. When Ryan Sessegnon opened Fulham’s account against Cardiff from close range he became, at 16 years and 94 days, the first player born in the 2000s to score in the Championship. It was a statistic Slavisa Jokanovic enjoyed; less palatable to the Fulham manager is the data analysis carried out by his colleague Craig Kline, who heads up the club’s recruitment model, and he did not hold back from criticising his methods after the 2-2 draw. “I’ve lost many players in this process in nine months,” Jokanovic said. “In the last two days I lost a few players who [Kline] believes are not good enough. I had an opinion from one of the best managers in the world on one of the players and he believes it is a good signing for us and I believe that too. Craig doesn’t believe it is a good signing for us and this guy is not with us.” Jokanovic may have been referring to James Wilson, who has joined Derby on loan from Manchester United. Regardless, battlelines appear to have been drawn. As analytics become increasingly focal to recruitment down the leagues, this kind of discord is likely to repeat itself; in the short term, you wonder just how long Jokanovic, whose spell at Watford suggests he does not exactly pick his club owners, is prepared to stand for the status quo.
Nottingham Forest are setting themselves up as the division’s great entertainers. If successive 4-3 home wins against newly promoted teams bode ill for their stability against more practised opposition there can be little doubt about the early value for money provided by Philippe Montanier’s young side. And especially the 19-year-old winger Oliver Burke, who finished clinically twice against Wigan and has the Premier League vultures circling. If Burke, with three goals to his name now this season, is smouldering then the Wigan striker Will Grigg is – yes – on fire. Four in four now for the Northern Ireland back-up striker after his pair at the City Ground; perhaps it is time someone thought up a song for him.
The early-season buoyancy at Huddersfield looked like being checked slightly by Yorkshire rivals Barnsley as their derby entered stoppage time. Then the substitute Jonathan Hogg adjusted himself to score emphatically from 15 yards, hand them a 2-1 win that puts then top of the Championship and heighten the sense that under David Wagner the Terriers are on to something. Hogg was the fourth substitute to score an important goal for Huddersfield in four games; although unpolished in some respects they are super-fit and playing insistently, with the kind of intensity you would expect Jürgen Klopp’s former right-hand man to demand. Can they keep it up? “It’s a picture of the quality and togetherness we have that everyone who starts and plays from the bench knows their job,” Wagner said. It feels as if they are around to stay.
Four games, four wins for Bolton in League One and after such an execrable 2015-16 season the shoots of recovery are evident. Phil Parkinson certainly seemed a canny appointment for a club reacquainting itself with lower-division life and although it took a late Josh Vela goal to beat Fleetwood 2-1 the adjustment has been smoother than expected. If they need a handy example of what can go wrong if a decline is not addressed swiftly, they only need look down the table: Sheffield United, four games into their sixth campaign at this level, now sit bottom of it after Steve Morison’s 89th-minute penalty winner for Millwall.
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