Milestones/Millstones

For a long time, major milestones celebrated at Ipswich Town were largely bittersweet.  Occasionally players clocked up an impressive number of appearances (I reckon 200 is the first significant one), even more rarely they hit a substantial goal tally (50 gets you amongst the icons for me), but it was hard to celebrate this sort of longevity amidst our multi-year break from joy.

Most of the big feats in the 2010s seemed to happen at miserable moments. Luke Chambers never quite made it to 400 appearances, but he made his 300th appearance in a 2-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest in December 2018. Ipswich were wretched and bottom of the league at the time and were comfortably beaten by a middling Forest side. Further adding to the indignity, Paul Lambert was the one who got to present Chambers with his prize, a lovely Magical Vegas-sponsored home shirt with “300 Chambers” on the back. If we had ended up forcing him on to 400 it almost would have felt more like a punishment.

Cole Skuse’s major milestone – his 200th game in a town shirt – was a little more respectable, a 2-1 win at Hillsborough. Skuse celebrated, in the words of Andy Warren of the East Anglian Daily Times, “with another 7/10 display… and that will make McCarthy very happy”. Two goals from Martyn Waghorn brought Mick’s penultimate win and twelfth place, but only scarce joy to a then rather ungrateful Ipswich fan base, many of whom had reached the “mutual contempt” stage of their relationship with the manager and many of his players. Three years had passed since his iconic 2015-thunderbastard against Cardiff and poor Cole’s reputation had rather unfairly slid from beloved metronomic regista to one half of the much-maligned Skuglas Crab.  

Since then, only Freddie Sears has reached that same way point and there was so little acknowledgement of that moment I can’t even find a newspaper article referencing his 200th appearance. I think it came in a Second Round FA Cup defeat to Portsmouth in 2020, played at Portman Road in front of the Covid cardboard cut outs. Is there a bleaker possible way to bring up your double century?   

For a milestone without (much of) an aftertaste we have to go all the way back to 2015, when Daryl Murphy notched his 1st goal at Craven Cottage to break the fifty barrier and send Ipswich on the way to a 2-1 win that moved us within two points of the top spot. Although even then Murphy managed to break his nose in the process of scoring it.

After relegation, player turnover seemed to prevent many more landmarks, before the Cook clear-out Summer meant nobody was going to break any barriers for the foreseeable future, with Kayden Jackson left as our most used player (on 99 appearances) and James Norwood the all-time top scorer at the club (with 21 goals). It’s only now, nearly three seasons later, that we’re starting to get the required longevity for this sort of thing.

And so it is that Conor Chaplin became the 23rd player to join the 50-club and just the fifth this century. Impossible to find anything to detract from this one, no imminent relegations, no massive fractures right down the middle of the club, no joyless parody of football played out over your laptop, not even a bloody nose. Just the joy of a club in a great place and a wonderful player and seemingly an excellent person, kicking off what will hopefully be a slew of landmarks for this group over the next few years, establishing some of these guys as proper club icons we’ll look back on over the decades.

What do you say about Conor? There’s something uncanny about his off-the-ball movement. Everyone in the world knows when and where he wants to appear, it should be easy enough to track, but it’s proven impossible for most opponents attempting to mark him over the past two seasons. The ability to be that elusive is something you don’t always get credit for as a footballer. The ways you stop, start, feint, go, hold, the ways you read your opponent’s movement and body shape, just to scratch out that patch of space, these are sometimes underrated skills.

The 50th goal was classic Conor Chaplin. As Cameron Burgess’ ball goes over the top, you’d swear that Swansea’s Left Back Josh Tymon is close enough to him to cut any passes out or at least to deny any clear effort on goal. Yet even before Leif Davis manages to get the ball under control, Chaplin’s scans right and separates himself just another metre or so from his marker. By the time Davis’ plays the pass that little, almost imperceptible, deviation has left Tymon too much to do to get across him, as Chaplin just slightly accelerates on to the ball, arriving at full pelt and finishing precise and low, as we’ve seen him do dozens of times before.

It's one thing to find that kind of space when it’s two players running a speed and slight change of direction can open up a chasm quite quickly, but Chaplin’s seemingly just as difficult to pick up in less promising scenarios, in packed penalty areas and from set pieces. He’s the guy to look for in our short corner routines, where he finds space that just shouldn’t exist. How is it possible to find a route to an aerial ball in amongst 20 bodies when you’re 5’6”? Goal number 49 (the winner against Sunderland) shouldn’t really be possible, but it wasn’t the first time he’d done it. He was even the end point of a Harry Clarke long throw last season for goodness sake. If Tommy Miller was the all-time Ipswich great at timing a run into the box, Conor Chaplin might just be the all-time world-champion of simply disappearing from everyone’s eye-line at any given time.

The invisible man routine is a great party trick and it comes with other humbler gifts. As it poured with rain and the pitch turned to soup on Saturday, Chaplin kept showing up at right and left back blocking crosses. He circulates intelligently and energetically in our press. When we need the overload down the right, you see him pop up behind Wes Burns and find a pocket, shield the ball, and ping long passes either cross field or curved round the inside of the opposition left back. He links play in triangles on both sides of the pitch, he plays neat, crisp through balls to his fellow forwards, like the one that sent Wes Burns free for the third against Rotherham on Tuesday.

An incredibly smart player with excellent attributes and a credit to the club. Off the field too, he always represents the club impeccably in interviews and community work, particularly with the Rainbow Tractors LGBTQ+ group. If there’s a stern seriousness to Sam Morsy’s leadership, Chaplin’s comes with a similar intensity but also a sense of joy and a little bit of silliness, often expressed in his goal celebrations. You need both to make a team function.  

Fifty well-deserved goals and you wonder how far he’ll ultimately get up that all-time table. If we’re promoted goals will obviously be harder to come by in the top division. But then you’d have said that about the Championship and just look at him! There’s always room for a player with that sort of game intelligence and there’s definitely a possibility he’s just as slippery for some Premier League defences as he is for the Swansea back line.

In that scenario, I would hope we’d show some of the players who got us there the kind of faith and loyalty that Chaplin saw as lacking at his previous club. For now, it’s just lovely to celebrate this sort of thing without reserve. After his fiftieth, Chaplin told reporters, “I love playing for this football club, it’s probably the most I’ve ever enjoyed being at a football club. I love everything about it. I love the town, I love the fans, I love the players that I’m playing with, the coaching staff. It’s a place that I really feel at home.” I think I speak for every Town fan when I say, the feeling could not be more mutual.

Conor Chaplin v Swansea City

Minutes 67

Goals 1

Shots 2

Accurate passes 21/30 (70%)

xG 0.19

xGOT 0.70

xA 0.04

Shot accuract 1/2 (50%)

Touches 41

Touches in opposition box 4

Passes into final third 5

Accurate long balls 3/5 (60%)

Clearances 2

Interceptions 1

Defensive actions 4

Recoveries 4

Duels lost 1

Ground duels won 0/1 (0%)

Fouls committed 1