Don't Look at Me

Ipswich fans, it seems to me, have had more than our fair of televised humiliations. There was of course, the original Mick McCarthy BBC version, at then non-league Lincoln City in 2016. Then there were the bright lights of ITV4 exposing the dying days of the Paul Cook regime, as Barrow knocked us out of Round Two. Away from the cameras, every modern Ipswich manager seems to have at least one cup farce in their locker. Paul Hurst didn't even make it through one full Winter but had time to lose a football match and lose his temper at League Two Exeter City. Paul Lambert’s feet were barely under the door when League One Accrington Stanley dumped his relegation-bound team out of the FA Cup. Even Kieran McKenna, usually immune to anything with a whiff of "Banter Era", has already contrived to lose to our local non-rivals Colchester United, making unwelcome room for some of East Essex's most irritating teenagers, full of cheap class As and bravado, to strut around Ipswich on an August Tuesday night.

All that still didn't prepare me for Saturday. Didn't prepare me for the A1 contender for promotion to the Premier League we know and love to somehow find a more abject humiliation than any of those other, objectively much worse Ipswich sides. We lost the novelty tie of the round, the one where the commentators rattle off what the opposition players have to do for a day job, the one where every football fan is willing you to somehow lose, the one that would lead every new bulletin because it just shouldn't ever happen. By 2.15pm we’d be wishing the BBC had stuck to its original policy of only televising middling all-Premier-League ties.

In the first 20 minutes I laughed a couple of times as we seemed to play a long game of pinball in their area, the ball clanging over and over again off all manner of barriers - post, bar, goalkeeper, defender, attacker. Internally I mused, "this is how cup upsets happen". Nothing goes in, the opposition draw strength from the scoreboard, the need to score gets more and more urgent, you over-commit and then, smack, a sucker punch. The laughter changes meaning, from gentle amusement to hysterical disbelief, as the shots rack up, 15, 20, 25. When Jeremy Sarmiento scored, you thought the ordeal was over, but it came again. Pow, 2-1. Shots racking up 30, 35. Desperate, pleading silence from 24,000 home fans, raucous incredulity from the travelling 4500 Kentish folk.

Afterwards you want to bargain with it. Which players failed? What did we do wrong tactically? Did we make too many changes? Whose effort or ability was found wanting? You could do that with all our past horror shows. Lincoln, Barrow, Exeter, Accrington they all told you something about the team and the club. Lincoln told you that Mick McCarthy's squads were paper thin and that his contempt for cup competitions was total. Losing to a non-league team, even across two games, made not the slightest dent in his ego. Getting out-played by Barrow, twice, even with relatively strong sides out, revealed the great void - tactical, spiritual - at the heart of that Paul Cook side.

Yet interrogating Saturday feels like arguing with the storm when your house gets struck by lightning. Is Nathan Broadhead a proper number nine? Might Vaclav Hladky have got out quicker to Reynolds? Does Axel Tuanzebe manage our high line as well as Luke Woolfenden? Do Dom Ball and Cam Humphreys offer less attacking threat than their first choice equivalents? Maybe, but if those are legitimate questions to ask, no significant evidence was added to the ledger during this freak show. Even in our least generous moods, we know deep down that Nathan Broadhead would be the best striker in the National League South, Dom Ball the best right back. If you watch much football at that level the future (or past) top EFL players are so obvious you could see them from space. When you draw at the Leicester Stadium to go Second in the Championship on Monday, "how could we have beaten Maidstone" is not a meaningful question to ask of your squad on Saturday.

Unlike those previous cup "upsets", this public humiliation does not point to a rotten core at the heart of the club. There are no conclusions to be drawn and no remedies to be applied (no, not even buying a striker). In a way that makes it feel worse. There can be a sense of comfort and control to diagnosing dysfunction in amongst your devastation. The baiting almost cuts less when you can just agree with it.

It’s horrible to be seen like this. Stuck in this pile of manure. There's nothing to be done. All you can do is sit in it, as the stink surrounds you and engulfs you. It's gross and it's not going anywhere for a while. We’ll lead the news bulletins this weekend, you’ll fend off most of the workplace mockery on Monday. Embarrassing and humiliating, but no choice but to shrug it off. Memories in football are shorter than you think. This too shall pass.   

Ipswich Town shots v Maidstone United

Jeremy Sarmiento 7 (xG 0.49 xGOT 0.34)

Jack Taylor 7 (0.45/0.66)

Nathan Broadhead 6 (1.1/1.07)

Omari Hutchinson 4 (0.21/0.44)

Sam Morsy 3 (0.11/0.98)

Conor Chaplin 3 (0.50/0.92)

Dominic Ball 2 (0.07/0)

George Edmundson 2 (0.2/0)

Wes Burns 2 (0.1/0.41)

Harry Clarke 1 (0.03/0.22)

Sone Aluko 1 (0.41/0)