Collective Joy

On Sunday Afternoon I strapped on the BabyBjörn and took my baby boy Nathaniel on two buses across the city to the Old Spotted Dog Ground in Clapton, East London. Clapton Women were playing Hackney Women and with Ipswich not in action until Monday night it was a good opportunity to watch a bit of football, take in some sunshine, have a good chat with my mate Millie, the only anarchist-communist Millwall fan. The home team won 2-0, with their numbers 7 and 8 (no names and numbers were provided to me) impressing with their athleticism and technical skill. The goalkeepers were the real difference though, Hackney’s stopper was uncertain in her decision-making, whilst Clapton’s was sure in her handling and made a couple of excellent saves to deny the visitors any route back into the game.

Nathaniel burbled and giggled in the sunshine, enjoying the colours and the constant noise from Clapton’s ultras on the terrace opposite. Millie ran across old friends, we ate Samosa Chaat from a food stall and grabbed a drink at the decent bar at the East end of the ground. Behind the goal the locals had hung a banner that proclaimed simply, “COLLECTIVE JOY”.

This is a maxim I do try to keep in mind whenever I go to a match. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that I voluntarily go to the football as fun, not actually as a form of psychic punishment, not to fret about the state of world football, nor to render myself apoplectic at referees or players (ours or theirs), nor to engage in self-pity at whatever fate has in store for my team. It is a tough thing to remember after six months in the Premier League. It feels like I have been writing the same blog for weeks on end about how unfair on us elite football has been, how few lucky breaks have come our way, how we deserve more but also just can’t compete.  

After Manchester United and Nottingham Forest I could feel myself settling down to write another miserable missive. The second half in Manchester left me as disappointed as I have been in us under McKenna. Forest, with our heartening performance followed by penalty heart-break and another 4 (FOUR!) additions to the injury list, felt a little too much like groundhog day. Bad seasons are long. They bring uncertainty for the future. They encourage wallowing. I have had the tickets for Crystal Palace away stuck to my fridge for a couple of weeks now and for the last few days I have started cringing every time I passed them.

After months of stumbling sadly down the steps from the West Stand Upper Tier, talking my mate Bill through whatever went wrong in that particular game, it is probably time to remind myself that I go to games to bring a smile to my face. The past two years I got used to relying on the football elevating my mood, soothing life’s worries and frustration. I referred more than once to Ipswich as my “emotional support football team”. I lost the habit of taking pleasure in amongst the usual lot of the football fan, where most seasons are less than you hoped for.

But where is the joy to be found in Ipswich’s winless 2025? The classic to fall back on is that the club is more than just the results we get on the pitch – it is friends, ritual, habit, church. I sat on the sofa sharing beers with a friend as I enjoyed our stoic, whole-hearted effort against Forest. There was gallows humour around the inevitability of our eventual defeat and the way it maximised player energy spent for zero reward. There is a fine line in gently mocking your own struggles, where having a laugh about your mis-fortunes becomes cruel (“how shit must you be, we’re winning away” is the worst chant in football, bar none) but thankfully, this team and its manager usually has enough about it that no-one really has much appetite for that.

In my search for joy I remain reluctant to start thinking of next season. I have tried resigning myself to our fate on several occasions, but it never seems to stick. It also doesn’t make the various defeats any less painful, so I’m as well continuing to cling to my illusions. Maybe we are about to see an improbable resurrection, just as Wolves suddenly give way like whatever part of Matheus Cunha’s brain maintains his emotional control. I know there’s few rational reasons to expect that. Most of the straws I looked to clutch at a few weeks back have not worked out, but hope and joy come as a pair. The hope doesn’t just kill you, it gives you regular rebirths.

In amongst our general shortcomings I do get the sense that we’ve acquired some footballers we’ll enjoy a lot over the next few years. Should the worst happen, the prospect of most of Sam Szmodics, Jack Clarke, Omari Hutchinson and Jaden Philogene being available to us next year, alongside longer-standing squad members, is pleasing. I like the idea that they will get a good pre-season with a top manager (maybe even the top manager we currently have) and a year to develop some chemistry before having another crack at the top flight. I also feel like O’Shea, Woolfenden, Greaves might prove pretty impregnable as a unit given a bit more time (alas it seems unlikely Axel Tuanzebe will form part of that future). Those acquisitions are an end point for a resurrection the club has undergone over the past three and a bit years, something that even the most cynical pragmatist could take pleasure in, even if it does feel like this cycle of success is ending with a whimper not a bang. In 2021 I could not have dreamed of full stadiums, contending for promotions, engaged, competent owners, a manager we all adore.

If the next eleven games have the potential to feel like some sort of purgatory, well, I suppose that’s something for me to just work on. I believe there’s joy to be found here and I need to stop cringing at those tickets for Saturday and start irrationally believing. Palace are heavy favourites, but every weekend, somewhere in the EFL, some team is overturning those kind of odds. We win, we put the pressure on Wolves and who knows what happens next. You just have to keep turning up to each game, one at a time, with the kind of confidence you’d hope the players would have. With the expectation that today is going to be good day. I don’t want them going through the motions, so I’m not going to either. Between now and May surely there will be something to bring us that collective joy. If not the big comeback, perhaps we’ve got the odd unlikely win, the occasional pleasurable performance, individual or collective. Look out for it. If it doesn’t come, well, I’ll be back next year. Spirit undimmed.