Free Hit

I woke up on Monday with a little spring in my step. There was still that little buzz from the Sunderland game, the one that makes live football so addictive, that makes you buy a ticket for an away game you’re almost certain you’re going to lose and end up traipsing dejectedly back home in the small hours, wondering why on earth you spent all that time and money to feel miserable.

The buzz was partially the addict waiting for his next hit, but also something else, a giddy pleasure at persuading myself that tonight did not matter too much. At kick off, we were level on points with Southampton in second, having survived the winter crunch with our automatic promotion credentials intact, if a little bruised. With the big win against Sunderland, we’d ultimately already kept our end up through Sam Morsy’s suspension, Cam Burgess’s international excursion and George Hirst’s hamstring disintegration. Whatever happened last night, we’d still be right in contention when the cavalry hopefully rolled in over the following ten days.

This was a night off football as anxiety. A game I could write off a little bit, travel in hope not expectation. A night too where supporters could bring a different energy. There’s been a lot of chat recently about the atmosphere at Portman Road, which I always think reflects context in counter-intuitive ways. Being second in the league on our budget is a bit of a high-wire act, every step has to be perfect and every burden added through injury and suspension makes it that bit harder to keep moving forward.

Relentlessly winning at home feels so necessary that any resistance the opposition offers is anxiety-inducing, an intolerable frustration. This is especially the case when it is a team that the league table indicates we should be beating. Every missed chance, every minute the clock ticks on without us taking the lead, the crowd seems to get quieter and nervier. You get periods of near silence, followed by an explosion of groans at a mis-placed pass or an errant shot.

Sometimes it’s nice to go somewhere as the underdog (not a feeling we’ve had for a while, it must be said). It makes football fans see things differently. You can clap every tackle, every controlled passage of play, every tenuous foray forward. Whilst things are level, whatever unfolds on the pitch, the clock ticks forward with a pleasing rhythm. You get louder and cockier as minutes rack up with your goal undisturbed, even if it’s obvious that you aren’t much in control. It’s the atmosphere that makes a cup tie.

Just as well, because without that free hit feeling, I’d have been fretting pretty quickly at the Leicester City Stadium.1 The first half unfolded like we were playing a team from the division above, which of course we were. For the most part we persisted trying to play through the lines, using our customary routes up the pitch – Woolfenden-Morsy-Clarke-Morsy-forward or Woolfenden-Clarke-Burns-forward or Hladky-Burgeess-Davis-forward – but of course, it wasn’t Morsy or Burgess and it certainly wasn’t going forward. I assume Lewis Travis has Samy’s press resistance in him somewhere, but McKenna hasn’t activated it yet, so balls received tend to go back the way he’s facing more often than not.

They might well have done anyway. Morsy talked on Town TV about being brave, but from the stands I wondered if discretion was the better part of valour for a while. During the first thirty minutes Leicester’s press was insanely quick. At one point twenty minutes or so in, Hladky clipped a sensible looking pass out to Leif Davis. By the time he’d controlled it, three alert Foxes had sprinted over, leaving him just a fraction of a second to hurriedly shuffle the ball backwards. All exits closed off by hard running, your marker’s hot breath on your back at all times, an unsympathetic referee unwilling to give cheap free kicks (or expensive ones really). Sometimes Ipswich tried searching for Wes Burns and Kayden Jackson down the channels, bypassing the intense traffic in our third of the pitch, but only rarely to much good effect.

It was a night for hanging in there. I was still hanging in there, as were most of the rest of the 3305 Ipswich fans. Even when calamity found Leif Davis for the second time in a month, we were still hanging in there.2 A belligerent mindset is a powerful thing and it felt to me that, unlike in some of our more winnable games, terrace and players were united in it, whatever was unfolding in front of us. One nil down, we’d barely had a kick and the songs kept coming, the players kept showing for the ball, kept their shape, kept trying to track their runners (In that regard, Travis had the toughest task, trying to catch greased piglet Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, who rather unfairly combined grace in possession with a distinct elusiveness off the ball).

It felt to me like the clouds started to clear just before half time. The intensity of Leicester’s harrying dropped just a tiny, almost imperceptible amount, maybe 2 per cent. In attack they continued to threaten, but off the ball passing lanes started to appear, tiny holes emerged in the suffocating blanket they’d thrown over our half of the field. Edmundson drove forward, his loose pass ended up a contested ball down our right, Chaplin emerged and fed Burns, who sped away and almost picked out Jackson on the penalty spot. Minutes later, Dewsbury-Hall danced his way through multiple tackles before Leif Davis finally managed to take it off him, finding Harness with a rare bit of unoccupied green turf in front of him. Harness’ long ball picked out Wes Burns’ diagonal run from right to left, with Burns skipping inside Vestergaard and firing over.

Two half chances felt like a feast after the previous forty minutes of famine. They also held out the promise of a more competitive second half. It seemed reserves of energy weren’t infinite, even in these higher-level Leicester players, and if we could tough it out through the manic patches, there’d be moments where we could assert ourselves. The agreement around me was that the first forty-five had been a tough watch, but we were still in it and that was quite enough for now. The only griping was ref-wards, in response to a “let-it-flow” style of officiating that had very much suited the home team thus far.

The start to the second half built on the end to the first, but five more positive minutes still gave way to another 15-minute period where we barely got out of our penalty box. McKenna apparently told us to go for it, take more risks, play our own game, but there weren’t obvious ways to do that when Leicester’s intensity got turned up to eleven. After the break though, they only had a brief burst of that left in them and, as he had at Portman Road, Enzo Maresca had them settle back into something much more conservative. Back in the early ‘90s, Maresca passed through the AC Milan youth team, just as I Rossoneri were winning multiple scudetti off the back of little more than a goal a game. Despite the Guardiola re-programming, perhaps somewhere deep inside Maresca the spirit of Fabio Capello still remains.

As the Foxes retreated, we threw on every waifish technician we had to hand, unleashing the energy of youth on an opponent who seemed like they fancied this match-up less and less every minute that passed. Taylor and Sarmiento, Hutchinson and Broadhead, all appetite, all forward-looking and direct-running. Was an equaliser coming? Yes and No. Collectively, Leicester kept making that one extra recovery run, the one that forces the attacking player to do one more excellent thing to get a proper shy at goal. It seemed like it would be one thing too many before Massimo Luongo, an uncommonly clutch attacker given his actual main role, unleashed a speculative shot. Jeremy Sarmiento’s scruffy finish from the rebound unleashed the kind of absolute bedlam you only get when you take points you really, genuinely, had written off before kick off. A new loan player gaining instant cult hero status by smuggling the ball under the goalkeeper in the last minute of a crucial game in a second-tier promotion challenge? It’s giving Martijn Reuser and I love it.

In the end it felt like the goal came because we all stuck with it. Fans and players built to a crescendo on and off the pitch. When the ball squirmed in, all that energy crackled round the stadium in round after round of “HE’S MAGIC, YOU KNOW, JEREMY SARMIENTO”. An uncommon electricity for a one-one draw in mid-January in pursuit of a still far off goal. I would love us to bring that feeling into every moment in every game – hope not expectation, dreams not demands, ambition not anxiety. I know we can’t, context is king for the rhythms of a crowd. But, for Monday night, it was great to live in the free hit.

Jeremy Sarmiento v Leicester City

Minutes 29

Goals 1

Accurate passes 9/11 (82%)

Chances created 1

Total shots 1

xG 0.49

xGOT 0.62

xA 0.01

Touches 17

Touches in opposition box 1

Successful dribbles 0/1 (0%)

Passes into final third 3

Accurate long balls 1/1 (100%)

Ground duels won 0/2 (0%)

Aerial duels won 1/2 (50%)

Fouls 1