Here We Go Again
Spring is here and Ipswich are winning
During our win over the reigning League One champions Plymouth, a certain popular aphorism, often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, came to mind. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme". There seemed to be a lot of rhyming going on. Last year's underdog champions sang "championes, championes, ole, ole, ole"1 to this year's underdog contenders for the title. The team many dismissed last year as "Loan FC" and "Deflection FC" lost to one absolutely massive deflection and one goal by a loanee. Plymouth spent much of last season complaining that they instantly slipped from the sports media’s view every time they lost a game, but ultimately had the last laugh. The BBC and Sky Sports stopped name checking Ipswich in any discussions of promotion a month ago, but here we still are, edging closer to the top spot.
Ipswich 2023-24 can see a lot of their reflection in Plymouth 2022-23. Like us, they slightly outperformed their underlying metrics, but brought that over-achievement to a point where it became futile for other teams to hope it was something systemic that would come back to bite them. Like us, they took the occasional pasting from near rivals (Barnsley and Peterborough for them, Leeds and West Brom for us) but never let it hold them up for long. Like us, they sometimes took it excessively personally that all the attention and praise from the sports media seemed to go elsewhere, getting increasingly bitter at the suggestion that having lesser resources makes it harder to maintain the same electrifying pace as the other more gilded contenders.
Meanwhile, we've got our own private bit of historical recurrence going on. Last February, a tough, deep, mid-Winter left us just barely holding on to the promotion race. A forgiving run of fixtures coincided with some new recruits finding their feet, so we ticked off "expected" wins, getting into our groove just in time for the real quiz, a series of tough games in our run-in. After drawing our home game with West Brom this season it didn't feel like we'd see second place again, but we've profited from games with 24th, 20th, 18th, 16th and 15th to haul ourselves above Leeds and Southampton and put ourselves in touch with Leicester, hoping to firmly establish ourself up there ahead of a tough April. Echoes of last year are palpable.
Déjà vu can be read as a quirk, a coincidence or something more mystical - fate, destiny, a higher power, the universe. As a materialist sort of guy, I prefer to read it as structure, as reflecting some underlying mechanic, an ultimately explicable logic, a set of forces a trained eye might read.
Granted, it's hard to see the rational thread that links Bali Mumba connecting a speculative shot with Cameron Burgess' shin, Conor Chaplin bumping a right-foot effort off Brendan Galloway's cranium and both dropping conveniently in the opposition goal. Although you might argue that both teams were good at working such shooting opportunities and willing to take those shots, so it's not that weird that they got their fair share of big goals from big deflections. I also suppose that the similar attitudes and gripes on display at Portman Road and Home Park a single season apart probably just tell you that lots of football fans never need much excuse to discern misfortune, unfairness and sometimes conspiracy against their club.
Ipswich Town bringing out the spring-time steamroller in consecutive seasons can be more systemically rationalised. The conventional football wisdom is that January is a bad time to do business. Teams are desperately casting about for instant fixes to new problems and are tempted to gamble by the prospect of big prizes (or worse, ominous trap doors). The Winter Window is a time of excessive and sometimes counter-productive spending.
Not for us. 2023 brought the exact four players we needed at the right time. Harry Clarke added athleticism, ball playing and attacking drive, multiplying Wes Burns' threat. Massimo Luongo made a good midfield completely uncontainable. Nathan Broadhead brought creativity and an x-factor that we didn't know we required. George Hirst's strength, speed and all-round forward play was just too much for most League One centre backs. Between them they turned an excellent, well-drilled team into something utterly irrepressible.
Despite much of the January Window feeling difficult, we may have pulled the same trick again. Kieffer Moore, Lewis Travis, Jeremy Sarmiento and Ali Al-Hamadi all upped the level of the group in crucial ways that fixed identifiable issues in precise ways.
Some of this is marginal gains. Sarmiento allows us to duplicate Broadhead's direct running and one-on-one threat when the latter is injured or off it. Travis contributes something more similar to our everything everywhere at all once first-choice centre midfielders. Before Al-Hamadi we trusted our backup strikers so little that we flogged George Hirst until bits of him fell off. Now everyone is impatiently tapping their feet until we get to see Ali's next mini-rampage. He's the exact combination of relentless hustle, speed, aggression, strength that we always needed to throw at defenders desperately trying to find a clear path to their forwards late in games they are losing.
Kieffer Moore is the key ingredient though. Appearing on deadline day after a long, public and unsuccessful pursuit of Blackburn's Sam Gallagher, Moore looked to some like a fall-back option. In some quarters, he was a poor fit for our style or too one-dimensional for our patterns of play. Moore was a victim of cliché. Strikers with unusual physical attributes tend to get typecast as “role” players. People chuck around "good feet for a big man" because there are a few in professional football for whom strength and size are their main claim to a living. Yet you forget that Alexsandr Mitrovic is a big man and Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a big man and Kieffer Moore is much more the Championship Zlatan than he is a one-dimensional big man throw-of-the-dice kind of player.
The monstrous physical attributes serve wider purposes, they fend off unwanted attention from defenders to earn a yard for a crisp first touch and a generally intelligent, precise passing range. They win him space in a crowded penalty area for some very consistent and very efficient finishing with feet as well as head. Moore’s headers create secure possession, not simply opportunities to win a second ball. This might seem a big call, but this current manifestation of Kieffer Moore, with his experience, decision-making, finishing and general play, coupled with his physical abilities, is probably the best all-round number nine we've had at the club since Darren Bent.
Maybe it's all just coincidence, but two February supercharges in a row smell like structure to me. It smacks of behind-the-scenes excellence. Where planning from window-to-window is working well, where problems are diagnosed early and solutions pursued doggedly, with the appropriate mix of realism and ambition (I have worried at times that our summer planning sometimes tends too far towards the latter). If we are one of the few teams with the knack of improving mid-season in this way, you can see why it might be a bit of a trump card.
Beyond transfers, late season acceleration might also point to well-planned workloads leaving as many players as possible in a good place physically as we enter the last quarter of the season. We looked fit on Saturday, Plymouth looked gone at 60 minutes. It might also be an indicator that as we move up the EFL and higher status players come into range, McKenna can unlock more and more ways to test opponents.
Perhaps then, our recent history of fantastic Februaries is more rhythm than rhyme, more method than destiny, a sign that the club has the structure and the practice to have everything in place at just the right moment.
Kieffer Moore v Plymouth
Minutes 81
Goals 1
Shots 5
Accurate passes 15/27 (56%)
xG 0.61
xGOT 0.63
xA 0.01
Shot accuracy 4/5 (80%)
Big chances missed 1
Touches 40
Touches in opposition box 8
Passes into final third 4
Accurate crosses 0/1 (0%)
Offsides 2
Dispossessed 1
Blocks 1
Defensive actions 5
Recoveries 2
Ground duels won 3/8 (38%)
Aerial duels 9/9 (100%)
Was fouled 3
Fouls 4
I often wonder if this sounds to actual Spanish-speakers more like mushrooms, mushrooms (champiñones) than champions, champions (campiones)?
Excellent writing Jack.