Composure

Frenetic, skittish Ipswich need a bit of calm

I started this blog with a disclaimer that I'm a "happy clapper", always trying to look for the positives. So, whilst I definitely wandered off from my seat in the West Stand at 5.15pm muttering "this is going to be a long old season", I'm going to try to look at least somewhat on the bright side amidst a second straight defeat. In a way, I'm going to do that because what else is there to do? The reality of our situation is that everything we were told about the yawning chasms between the division is true. We're 17th in the table and that probably flatters us a little if you dare to look at any statistics other than the bottom four's points column, but there’s no sense giving anything up after 8 bloody games.

Awaiting the delayed kick off

As a newly-promoted club I suppose you go into the season with a dream scenario and a nightmare scenario. In the dream your momentum, the buzz of the stadium, your unique style of play and your underrated players surprise your opponents, and you rack up unexpected points so quickly that relegation looks unlikely from the outset. In the nightmare you get smashed every week by everyone you come across and start to look nervously at that Derby County lowest points record.

If very creditable home performances against Fulham and Villa largely took the nightmare scenario off the table, the last two with West Ham and Everton have seen that lovely dream scenario finally float off into the sky (like bubbles, I suppose). At the final whistle yesterday being the fourth worst team in the division, let alone anything better, felt a long way off, particularly as two of the three teams below us likely have a surge into mid-table in them.

Where can I dig out some realistic hope that we aren't just destined for an extended tour of misery and public embarrassment?

The usual way we do this is by imagining different things we could try in order to fix stuff. Fans of struggling teams love to pin their problems on specificities of personnel and system. If we move Omari Hutchinson wide or swap Wes Burns for Chio Ogbene or Jack Clarke for Sammie Szmodics, if we go 3-5-2 or 4-3-3, if we press higher or drop deeper, if we go longer or play more direct, we'll get back on track.

I'm a bit sceptical about any of these potential solutions, which seem to me like a way of bargaining with reality. It's not that I don't think the last two games will have given McKenna any new problems to ponder or that it’s worthwhile for supporters to just close off all discussion by deferring to the manager. “In McKenna we trust”, sure, but we still get to pick the bones out of failures. It’s more just that the underlying problem might be something impervious to messing about with the system. The players on other teams might just be, relative to anything we've faced in decades, really really excellent. Ours, relatively speaking, not (so far).

This really came home to me thinking about how I regarded run-of-the-mill Premier League players before this season. Ask me about Michail Antonio after years watching him on Match of the Day and I'd have said "yeah, decent enough player, but nothing special". Well, trotting out against Ipswich at the London Stadium he went straight into the top five centre forwards I'd ever seen play against us.

Everton fans grab a pint in the drizzle

Same goes, really, for Everton stalwarts Idrissa Gana Gueye and Abdoulaye Doucouré, not amongst the players you mention with awe before you get here, but more accomplished and athletic (even at 35 in Gueye's case) than pretty much anyone I've ever seen play in midfield for or against us in the two decades before this season. My Evertonian friend Mike highlighted Doucouré in a deeper role as a weakness pre-kick-off, so his composed performance rather exacerbated my sense of Ipswich’s general inferiority.

That’s before you get to the big stars. As a Southampton-supporting friend complained to me recently, “trouble is, every other team in this division has a player who is essentially a nuclear weapon, capable of destroying you at any moment”. On Saturday, Dwight McNeil felt like the one.

There might be marginal gains to be had in swapping some personnel or adjusting our tactics, but it probably won't fundamentally change this equation. We have had individual errors and anonymous performances from both nominal starters and would-be replacements, new recruits and old hands. Clangers dropped by Aro Muric, Axel Tuanzebe, Ben Johnson, Axel Tuanzebe, Jacob Greaves, Leif Davis, Kalvin Phillips, Sam Morsy and Wes Burns, basically anyone who has spent enough time close enough to our penalty area for their mistakes to directly cost us. Some of these have been the price paid for "bravery", for a necessary willingness to take the ball under pressure, but lots of them have simply been malfunctions, the product of players operating at their absolute limits in terms of speed of thought and execution.

Does Dara O'Shea know how to avoid putting his clearing headers back into danger? Of course. Does Wes Burns know how to volley a loose ball out of his own penalty area? Definitely. Can all eleven Ipswich players make those correct decisions instantly 100 times out of 100 whilst playing at near constant maximum physical exertion in a Premier League game? Not so far.

Wes crosses himself before kick off

"Individual errors" but a collective problem. It's not restricted to our own penalty area either. We move on quicker from attacking opportunities missed, but the same issue - composure - afflicts our forwards. Can Jack Clarke strike a ball well? Ask Vaclav Hladky. Is he settled enough in a Premier League game to go cold when a good chance presents itself? Not so far. Even before finding the upper tier with our best chance on Saturday, he'd often been hesitant in promising situations - dwelling on the ball or passing when the shot was on, shooting when the pass was more obvious.

Likewise, Omari Hutchinson shows no sign that he's technically or athletically unsuited to the level. He’s hurting the opposition in some parts of the pitch - only Mohammed Kudus, Jeremy Doku and Adama Traore have completed more dribbles in the Premier League. Yet, has he regularly found the pass, shot or cross allowing us to profit from our best player taking opponents out of the game? Not so far.

Where’s this “bright side” you promised then Jack?

I suppose I could fall back on the simple fact that we are not, as yet, in the relegation zone. There are at least three teams that are not currently accelerating away from us. I could also take comfort in recent precedent for teams going this deep into the season without registering a win but nevertheless staying up comfortably. This ain’t over and nothing at all is settled eight games in. That said, I think it’s probably better to address yourself to the present as it actually is. We haven’t set a standard sufficient to give ourselves a fighting chance of staying up, not so far. So what I’m going to have to do is make that “so far” load bearing. There are good reasons to think this team has not peaked and will improve.

Well, I’ve got three anyway.

First of those is McKenna. During his time here he has continually solved problems, often without the need for reinforcement of his playing staff. For instance, the rapid defensive solidity developed almost immediately after his arrival or the way we dug our way out of January ruts in both promotion seasons. His teams (and sometimes his players) have also sometimes taken a few months to properly hit their stride, so it’s not entirely unrealistic to hope his coaching methods are going to elevate collective and individual performances over time.       

Second, we have had a lot of turnover in the Summer, more by a long way than in any other McKenna window. When you are dependent, as we desperately are, on the whole being more than the sum of its parts, that matters more than it usually would. Up to now truly cohesive performances have been rare but the hope is they can become more regular over time. It takes time for partnerships to develop, for connections to form and for patterns of play to get internalised. We probably have more scope than the more established teams to progress here.

Third, if we’re talking composure, composure comes from feeling comfortable. We have a lot of players with good reason to be a bit skittish about the challenge confronting them. There are young players like Greaves, Davis, Hutchinson, Clarke and Delap, for whom these are their first real minutes at this level. Inconsistency in execution and decision-making comes with the territory. Then you have Muric, O’Shea, Ogbene, Phillips and Johnson, all with recent career failures (some group failures, some individual) and all with anxieties about future progress. To them you can add the army of players for whom this is highest point they’ve reached in long EFL careers, who understandably are taking time to adjust. Potentially, some of the individual errors get less common as some of them settle (though not all of them ultimately will), particularly if we can pick up a bloody win sooner rather than later.

For me, the thread that links the three is staying the course. For us and for the team. If the inquests and scapegoating from supporters get too intense, if the belief drops too much, then building that collective buy-in to what we’re doing gets immeasurably harder. if McKenna rips up his plans, starts second-guessing himself too much, chasing new systems, tinkering endlessly with personnel, it becomes less likely that the team develops collectively over time and that cohesive performances become more common. It makes it harder for his coaching to take effect or patterns of play to get ingrained. It delays rather than advances the time when individuals feel settled in these encounters. Tempting as it might be to start ringing the changes, I suspect believing in the players we have and the plans drawn up for them pre-season is the only road to anything good.

The obstacles in front of us might ultimately be more than we can overcome, but sticking together and standing our ground may ultimately be all we have.