Grindset Mindset

A football away day is one of the great pleasures, in fact one of the great privileges, in life. Not just because an away end is always noisier and an away win always that bit more satisfying. Nor even because it’s a big day out and a chance to cut loose with your gang. For me, it’s because the football traveller has a unique opportunity to know England. Who else, bar maybe travelling salespeople and some construction workers, gets to see all these provincial towns and cities? What other leisure pursuit takes you to Fleetwood, Hull, Exeter and Gillingham and everything else in between. Not just that, but to see them on matchday, in full local mobilisation, the town folk packing their pubs, shuffling, striding, bellowing their way towards their own little house of worship.

The group road trip has its obvious attractions, but sometimes I feel like I underestimate the solo away day. You have this space to airily explore, practice a bit of flâneurisme, to wander with no purpose, imbibing both atmosphere and little gems of civic architecture. You can quietly feel the sights and sounds of a place. Most of the towns we end up in aren’t places we would ever choose to go. I find it hard to imagine myself coming up with a holiday itinerary that might include Barnsley. But Barnsley had its charms. I arrived in blazing sunshine and found its grand inter-war Town Hall, surrounded by flowers and cherry blossom trees, as well as reminders of the town history of toil in the local coal mines. I wandered up and down sweeping brick terraces that led the way to Oakwell, then stood on the North Stand Kop watching the sun go down over the town. Everywhere they go, football fans in England sing “[This town] is a shit hole, I want to go home” but there’s always something to be enchanted by.

The trouble with away games is usually the football. It might be a cliché, but it’s also true. Most weekends, the majority of away fans make their long journey home with something less than they hoped for. The average Championship team last season saw just seven away wins, meaning the most loyal travelling fans finished their excursions with at least a touch of regret 70 per cent of the time. Two games in every five they left with the victorious home support’s celebrations ringing in their ears. Comfy away wins are not a regular feature of any team’s existence. Even our imperious march through League One saw just seven away wins by more than more one goal. At least a modicum of suffering was a feature of sixteen of them.

I’ve been doing these trips for nearly 25 years now, so such realities weigh on the mind. There’s a feeling that the more effort I go to in following the Super Blues, the more likely it is that we’ll get beat and nothing is saving my mood after that. Local food specialties and monuments are no salve for watching three sides of a stadium rise in ecstasy at your own misfortune. We know all this, but I think we all discount it as soon as the whistle blows. You get into the match and immediately start thinking about football as football, and you disregard the difference between what we can do at Portman Road and what we do in another lion’s den.

On our pitch, we try to blow teams away. Elsewhere, we have periods where we lose control, games are tight and the opposition have chances.  We spend periods sat in shape, without the ball, waiting perhaps to spring a speculative raid on the counter attack. The back four seems to spend more time than we’d expect heading, blocking and otherwise inelegantly getting the ball out of dangerous areas. We have to grind.

We play such spectacular football at our best, that the individual results in our almost entirely binary away record (1-2, 0-1, 0-1, 0-1, 1-1, 0-1), felt at the time a bit fortunate, sometimes disjointed, sometimes less polished than usual. As if we’d got away with one and then another and another. I’m not sure that we really did. The kind of suffering we got last night against Bristol City is in the fundamental nature of most away wins. As an away team in a competitive league, I reckon you’re doing your job if you “edge” a majority of your away games and compete in almost all the rest.

The inexact science that is shot count and expected goals certainly seems to suggest we’re doing just that. In our six away games we’ve had more shots and xG than the opposition in four of them, including the one we didn’t win at Huddersfield.  In two instances, the xG gap was relatively large (0.9 at Ashton Gate, 1.26 at Hillsborough). The two where we didn’t – Sunderland and Southampton – we led for long periods and as a result soaked up a fair bit of pressure. Southampton created no big chances at all despite trailing for 60 minutes, Sunderland only really got going after Janoi Donacien got his clock cleaned. We probably aren’t five road wins from six good (is anyone?), but we are a good away side.

The question is probably why that’s the case, and also why our good away side seems so different to our good home team. I suspect the answer is that defending well in shape is an underrated aspect of McKenna’s skill set. No one would generally think to relate modern Ipswich and the low block. People are generally impressed by the patterns of play in possession and the intensity and focus of our pressing game. At times though, especially away from home, we do sit off and let the opposition have it for spells and in those situations we are good at defending our box.

Unlike last Winter, where we seemed to concede to every brief flicker of opposition pressure for a couple of months, now when we’re set up to do it we genuinely do look like we can defend our penalty area for long stretches. This team takes up good collective shapes, it cuts passing lanes, it fills up spaces, it puts pressure where it’s needed and creates fouls when it needs relief. This team is a lot more steely, a lot more muck and bullets, than it gets credit for. The most obvious manifestation of this is the two centre backs and, above all, absolute ball magnet, heading machine, Cameron Burgess.  

We used to complain that Accrington Stanley paid for most of their stadium by selling us rotten players, but with Burgess flourishing, I wonder if we might finally have pushed ourselves into profit there. The fees spent on Kayden Jackson and Janoi Donacien have long since been recouped in service to the club, even if we’ll never make actual money on them, whilst the £750,000 we gave them for Big Cam is more of a robbery every single day. He now reads the game faultlessly, his positioning is almost always on point and taking him on in an aerial duel is possibly the most pointless endeavour in Championship football. He’s now chucking in raking cross field passes, controlled volleys back into midfield, zipped passes out to Leif Davis. He’s “head it, kick it”, but both head and kick always seem to generate quality possession for us. If he were even three years younger, there would be an enormous queue of Premier League teams forming as we speak. Away from home, when we’re pushed closer to our own goal, he’s the bedrock of it all.

It's almost impossible that we keep our away form at this level. We’re already halfway towards the 10 wins that had Preston as the fifth best away team in the league last year. But we definitely are developing a working, sustainable formula, even if it is one that requires a lot more dirty work than our home games feature. We have ways and means of doing that dirt and one guy in particular who seems to live for grinding it out. Perhaps it’s time to appreciate that grind for what it is, rather than instinctively look for drop-offs and sloppy performances.

Cameron Burgess v Bristol City

Minutes played 90

Accurate passes 56/70 (80%)

Touches 82

Passes into final third 9

Accurate long ball 6/12 (50%)

Dispossessed 0

Tackles won 1/1 (100%)

Blocks 2

Clearances 6

Headed clearances 5

Recoveries 7

Ground duels won 2/2 (100%)

Aerial duels won 3/4 (75%)

Was fouled 1

Fouled committed 0