Just a Little Airborne

In the classic episode of The Simpsons “Lisa the Vegetarian” (episode 5, season 7, before it got weird), Homer, jealous of his neighbour Ned Flanders, throws a backyard barbecue. There’s the usual grilled meats plus the pièce de résistance – a whole roasted suckling pig. Just as Homer prepares to cook his centrepiece, his recently-turned vegetarian daughter Lisa charges at the barbecue with a ride-on lawn mower, propelling the wheeled grill into the street. The pig gathers speed as it rolls down hill. As they chase it, Homer continues to hold out hope. “It’s just a little dirty, it’s still good!” as it crashes through a hedge. “It’s just a little slimy, it’s still good!” as it floats down the river. “It’s just a little airborne, it’s still good!” as a pipe in the river propels the pig into the sky. Finally Bart calls time on hope, “It’s gone”. Homer replies forlornly, “I know.”

Over the years this scene has tended to come back to my mind whenever Ipswich Town’s form has slid us away from key objectives, as a prompt that sometimes you just need to see things as they are. 2014-15 as we dropped out of top two contention into the play-off and out in the semi-finals. 2018-19 as we got more and more detached from 21st place. In 2021 and 2022, as the play-offs finally drifted from view. It’s just a little down to ten men at Carrow Road, it’s still good. It’s just a little 15-point gap to safety, it’s still good. It's just a little 3-0 down at Northampton, it’s still good. It's just a little home defeat to Cambridge, it’s still good. It’s just a little Valentine’s Day Bristol stalemate, it is still good.

A lot of my effort goes into calculating why everything might still be fine, how odds can still be overcome, how things can turn out exactly as you’d hoped. Even after one win in ten games, I’m still eyeing our next nine kindlier fixtures with greedy eyes. But sometimes, you have to protect yourself and be a bit more … in the present. You need to revert back to that OGAAT (one game at a time) mindset. For sure, you’ll keep chasing the roasted pig and who knows, you might (like we did last season) improbably catch up to it in the end.

But let’s not kid ourselves here. The straightforward, rational thing to believe right now is that the three teams above us with greater resources should start pulling away from us. Frankly, they should have been doing that since August. Whilst we were streaking ahead of them, we were certainly right to believe we were there on merit, but now we’re very much in gravity reasserting itself territory. Terrible timing for us to produce our best Championship season in decades to coincide with three teams who had no business at all getting relegated.

We’re now behind them in the table and all three above us look exactly as invincible as they should, with form charts covered in green. Ours have a disturbing number of yellow (draws) and we all know draws are murder in a promotion push. There’s not much comfort to be found in underlying numbers either, where we’ve dropped from being the best attacking team in the division to fourth (fourth for chances created, third for goals scored), whilst our defensive numbers remain much where they always were (tenth for goals conceded, fourth for chances allowed). Our rivals squat, fat and satisfied, as first, second and third for possession, expected goals, shots on target, big chances created and possession won in the final third. In short, the table tells a story of us as the fourth-best team.

Admittedly, we have had some rough justice of late. Preston benefitted from two bad refereeing decisions in the first seven minutes of our away game last week, plus two incredibly unfortunate touches from George Edmundson. We’ve also gone through a similar funk to one we went through this time last season, where every opposition shot on target finds a way into our net, whilst we seem to spurn umpty chances to punish the opposition. Preston and West Brom scored 5 times from 15 shots (a shot efficiency of 33%, the current average for the division is 8.5%), we managed 4 goals from 46 shots (8.7%). I dare not add Maidstone to these calculations.

These must be particularly frustrating periods for McKenna. If you’re getting dominated game after game , finding it tough to work openings, getting torn apart defensively twenty times a game, there are structural things you can change, patterns, shapes and instructions you can alter. But these wild fluctuations in finishing efficiency? No magic wand for affecting that really. Contra the popular wisdom, you can’t just put everyone on shooting practice and expect results, nor flip the keepers round and assume things will improve. No point telling Luke Woolfenden not to get dribbled past, as it has apparently only happened five times all season. Largely all you can do is to keep to the process and hope shot efficiency at both ends shows a bit more equilibrium.

Fortune hasn’t favoured the brave Ipswich of late, but perhaps we allow fortune too much play in our games for the kind of race we’re in. To get close to the kind of 95-point season the team in second might have this season, you need probably 29 wins. To get those you really need to be comfortably on top in half your games, to give you space to draw a few against the run of play and to offset splitting the difference in your other 23 games. Both of our last two games were tight enough affairs to give the opposition a chance, even if one point from six was tough to take. Watching our rivals Leeds play recently at Bristol City it struck me that the hosts were barely in the game. It was like watching teams from two different divisions. Even at our best, I fear the opposition have more of foothold in the game, although Bristol City happened to keep it within one goal that night.

Don’t get me wrong, this definitively isn’t me writing us off. I had these same feelings last year and look what happened (though the underlying stats were much more favourable then, it has to be said). There’s still a route to second for us. But it is sometimes good to revert to OGAAT and liberate yourself from that “keeping up with second place” conversation. A bit of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.

What was the one game at a time I saw on Saturday? An entertaining draw against a good team with an excellent manager. A very good performance, where they were more clinical than we were, but a decent point in another context. Yet, I couldn’t take it on its merits, I had to worry about what it would do to our chances. I couldn’t focus on the good this team have done, I had to worry about the glittering prize that might be slipping for view. Still mired in my funk about points dropped, rather than the point Omari Hutchinson won late on, I then had only a brief half hour (piss off Sky) before I could get frustrated about Leeds’ comfortable win and Southampton’s five-goal second-half.

Well, no more. We always knew we’d be seriously punching to stay in second. Free yourself from expectation, let each game wash over you on as its own thing. Trust McKenna and the process and the players. The rest will look after itself.