Armadillo

During Ipswich's loss to Manchester City I discussed our survival chances with a friend. As we set about defending at 1-1 he asked "Can you do the armadillo thing?" By which he meant, could we, when threatened, like the three-banded armadillo, roll into a tight ball, covered tightly by our thick outer armour, protecting ourselves from larger predators?1

"Not really?" I answered. "Well, we did a bit in away games last season." In truth, whilst I've seen us produce some very effective defensive performances under McKenna, I didn't think there was any version of "armadillo", "parking the bus" or "playing in a low block" that would do us any good that afternoon and so it proved.

The standout feature of McKenna's Ipswich over the past two seasons has been the volume of goals: 193 across our league games. Last year, home games especially became chaotic goal-fests where we scored and often conceded freely. Fixtures with Blackburn and Leeds, ending 4-3 either way, were not out of keeping with our season. We all knew that we would have less joy going forward this season and with only the seventh best defence in last year’s second tier, keeping the ball out of our net was clearly going to be a key concern.

Surprisingly though defensive resilience has been the most positive sign from our difficult start. Early days, but despite the toughness of our fixtures, we’re conceding goals far more slowly than last season’s relegated trio (1.8 goals per game to Luton’s 2.23, Burnley’s 2.05 and Sheffield United’s 2.73), none of whom kept a clean sheet until December. We are currently conceding at near enough the same rate Brentford, Forest, Wolves and Bournemouth did last year.  

How to explain this? It is easy for coaches up from the EFL to be typecast as either naïve or cynical, as if Vincent Kompany and Sean Dyche were the only possible ways to be a manager. Pragmatism and purity get presented as ideologies, you can be a “grinding-out results” type or a “suicidally sticking to your principles” type. You must choose and only the first choice is likely to see you out-perform your relatively puny resources.

I’m not sure either stance really describes McKenna and we might be profiting from that. Scoring a tonne of goals makes you look like an attacking football purist with only one way to play, but in 2021 McKenna inherited a team with a truly awful defence then quickly made solidity and game management his priority. Everything else was built on that and it was only later that the attacking juggernaut turned up.

Last season, we were quite prepared to have ding-dong basketball matches at Portman Road, but on our travels we seemed happy enough to let even mid-table opponents have a lot of ball and territory. Even if the ideal is pressing high and penning teams in, McKenna has never been above drilling his team to stay compact, block shots, clear crosses and wait for opportunities. Nor have Ipswich been particularly obsessive about playing out from the back. You watch some teams pass in their penalty area and it feels like their manager dishes out fines for long passes, but McKenna’s teams are never averse to knocking it over a particularly aggressive high press.

McKenna is less a theorist and more of a “praxis” guy, engaged in working out how an idea can be embodied and enacted over time, rather than the idea itself. In some ways he is still a “trust the process” coach, looking beyond results in order to instil consistent principles and patterns of play, but adapting to different phases of the game seems to be a key part of that process. In terms of elite coaches, he’s more Ancelotti than Pep and I never had any fear that failure to understand context would be our downfall this season.

There was plenty to be optimistic about in our defensive performances at the Amex Stadium. Aro Muric turning in a man of the match performance was a massive relief, evidently we need to send him out on the piss back home more often. Concern over individual errors leading to goals is often overplayed. Whilst the difference between the most and least error-prone keepers in the division last season was 5 extra goals conceded, the difference between the worst and best shot stoppers was 18. An eccentric who actually saves shots trumps a steady guy who goes down in instalments.   

Elsewhere, Axel Tuanzebe’s ground defending against Karou Mitoma was astonishingly good and the ongoing resurrection of career is one of the most satisfying bits of business we’ve done in the last year or so. Leif Davis’ positional play is also on a steep upward curve from our first fixtures. It has got to be helpful tactically when you don’t have to constantly worry about your full backs being left to do one-to-one defending.

O’Shea and Greaves complimented each other well in defensive phases, even if O’Shea’s passing left a little to be desired first half. In general our shape out of possession seems to make us hard to play through (including for Liverpool and Man City at times), even if it isn’t currently producing as many high turnovers as we’d like.

Reasons for hope, but also time for some realism. Battling our way to a very good point is in lots of ways a lovely thing, but I’m still finding it hard to properly evaluate this team’s progress. There are parallel universes where alternately we’re sat here with zero points or where we’ve picked up shock wins, both of which might signal where we’re ultimately heading this season. At it stands though, the way we have shown our ability to compete in some aspects but not others makes us hard to place.

McKenna’s post-match remarks betray a belief that like 2021-22 this is a team in transition. “The game was more in Brighton's favour than we'd have wanted it to be.” Whilst we work on connections and covalent bonds, we are doing things we’d prefer not to. I doubt it was the case that we set up to just nullify Brighton, more that it just worked out that way because we lost duel after duel in midfield (in Morsy and Phillips’ defence, Carlos Baleba was outrageously good), then ran down too many blind alleys in transition. To make any real impact we will need to offer attacking threats that aren’t Liam Delap running in a straight line.  

We are sat bottom or near bottom for pretty much every underlying attacking statistic – possession, xG, shots on target, big chances, passes completed, crosses completed, touches in the opposition box, all 19th or 20th. Yes ,that’s a product of the fixture list but it’s also a function of things that we haven’t yet managed to do well – make good use of counter-attacks or create clear opportunities during our rare spells of territorial dominance. Ultimately we won’t stay up based on our penalty box defending. En route to seventeenth place Nottingham Forest had the better chances (on xG, sorry) in 18 of their 38 games last season, something we’re yet to achieve that this season.

It will take a bit of time. Not to be unexpected, our starting line-up on Saturday contained six recent acquisitions and since McKenna’s arrival we’ve never previously swapped out more than four main first teamers in a single window. Unfortunately, I don’t think we should expect it to suddenly click into gear by Saturday either, even as we roll into possibly our easiest away game (aka one of the best teams we played last season).

This is going to be harder to live with as supporters. We’ve all forgotten the stress of watching a team defend their penalty area for the vast majority of a league fixture, doing it against a team we hope to beat might prove the toughest watch of all. Unfortunately, the functional stuff might have to continue for a little while yet. I’m not too worried though, McKenna has shown before that he knows well how to plot a route through to sunnier climbs.

Axel Tuanzebe v Brighton and Hove Albion

Minutes 90

Accurate passes 20/23 (87%)

Chances created 1

Touches 48

Successful dribbles 1/1 (100%)

Passes into final third 1

Accurate long balls 0/1

Dispossessed 0

Tackles won 2/3 (67%)

Blocks 1

Clearances 7

Interceptions 1

Defensive actions 12

Recoveries 2

Dribbled past 1

Ground duels won 4/5 (80%)

Aerial duels won 2/3 (67%)

Fouls 0