Minor Op

This weekend is usually a good moment to reflect on the state of things and think about the January window. Cup games are not terribly reflective of very much, so scarcely worth dwelling on who did themselves a favour (Kalvin Phillips, Jack Clarke, George Hirst) and who did not (oh Ali…). Are they good enough to test Bristol Rovers isn’t a question we ever needed answering.

So instead let’s talk about the squad and the window. Popular wisdom has January as “a bad time to do business”. Way back in the parallel universe that was 2021, it was even Ipswich CEO Mark Ashton’s view: “January’s always a really difficult window, I’ve got to be honest with you. I said in the summer that I prefer to do most of our business in the summer transfer window.”

The basis of this view is plausible enough. Mid-season the buying club is often desperate to solve some imminent crisis and the selling club has usually done all its squad/ budget planning for the season and doesn’t need or want to sell anyone good.

As it turns out though the winter window can also be a moment for tinkering. Summer squad builds can be a bit abstract. You don’t quite know what you’ve got without seeing them regularly in competitive action. In January you’ve had a few months to directly observe that you might need more thrust at right back, a little more pizazz off the bench or a lot more presence up front. Summer, you are designing the car, it’s concept and blueprint, winter is topping up the oil, tinkering with the transmission.

I suspect Ashton’s position has changed since then. 2023 and 2024 were transformative winters for Ipswich, on each occasion supercharging promotion campaigns. He and McKenna have been excellent at (relatively economical) diagnosis and repair for two seasons straight. So what needs fixing now?

Defence

When you’ve shipped four goals in 20 per cent of your games, it’s probably natural to think your defence needs work. Counter-intuitively though, I think defensively the first half of the season went almost as well as we could have expected. The other 16 games we played saw just 19 conceded, which is eminently manageable. Keeping the opposition to binary (0 or 1) most weeks is almost the best thing you can do for your relegation fight and Ipswich have achieved that a respectable 11 times.

Most of those four-goal days had the same thing in common, we selected an orthodox right back at right back (Harry Clarke or Ben Johnson) rather than a centre half with right back tendencies (Axel Tuanzebe or Dara O’Shea). With Axel’s injury troubles and Dara needing to be available for centre back duty, acquiring another right-back-ish centre back was the obvious necessary fix and very re-assuringly we went and did it in the first week of January. Ben Godfrey looks ideal for the purpose – tall, fast, athletic, tidy in possession, everything we need there. Bonus points for Premier League experience and not taking up one of two domestic loan spots.

The rest of it is surely as you were. We are not yet done with Aro Muric, who we will still hope can fixed with a bit of work on stilling his mind at key moments. Perhaps a meditation regime would do the trick. In the meantime Christian Walton is doing a fine job anyway.

Elsewhere there’s been some speculation about selling and replacing Luke Woolfenden and Cameron Burgess. Obviously, either exit would break my heart, but even putting that aside I still can’t see the case for it. Woolfenden and Burgess have impressed when picked and look in no way substandard for the level. Improving on either as individuals would incur considerable effort and expense for very marginal reward (as no incomer is likely to start ahead of O’Shea and Greaves). Any gain would come at the cost of further unmooring the squad from any connection to the promotion journey and that is surely “institutional memory” we should look to preserve as long as possible.

It is worth noting that the clubs we are looking to catch up to – Brighton, Brentford, Fulham, Bournemouth – all maintained a grounding in personnel connected to their rise for several seasons post-promotion: Lewis Dunk, Shane Duffy, Ethan Pinnock, Tom Cairney, Lewis Cook to name a few.

Verdict: Ben Godfrey is plenty, no more business necessary. Hopefully a good loan to help Harry Clarke kick on.

Midfield

If you asked me a few weeks ago about our midfield, I might have had something more interesting than “as you were” to say about it. Kalvin Phillips kept mysteriously appearing on the bench and never making it on the pitch, no matter the circumstances. 1-0 down? Better get Jack Taylor on for Jens Cajuste. 1-0 up? Hmm, think this calls for Jack Taylor on for Jens Cajuste.

What mysterious scenario, we wondered, was Kalv being held back for? As it turned out there wasn’t much mystery. Phillips was nursing an ankle injury and was now seen as cover for the deeper Morsy role, rather than the box-to-box Cajuste role. Simple as that.

When we brought him back in for Arsenal he looked rather good and grew into the second half. He then ran the show against Bristol Rovers, which I suppose you’d damn well hope he would given the opposition, but plenty of players in Phillips’ situation don’t take such opportunities. Simple.

Well, nothing simple about it really. We’ve found ourselves in a peculiar situation where our undroppable and almost unsubstitutable club captain sits in front of easily our most prestigious player. Not that prestige should get him in the team, but it isn’t an arrangement we likely envisaged when we took a punt on a former England international and hoped to resurrect his career. Would we drop Morsy – with everything that might mean for the wider cohesion of the group – for what is really just a hope that 2021 Kalvin Phillips is in there somewhere?

On the other side there’s no dislodging Cajuste who is everything we could have possibly hoped he would be. Dynamic, strong, technically assured, progressive on the ball and (mostly) diligent and determined in his defensive work. Jack Taylor has developed into an excellent understudy, offering enough physicality to be a good defensive sub and enough long passing and shooting ability to make him an attacking option too. No upgrade looks likely to me here.

So we rumble on with the sneaking suspicion that we do probably need something more in midfield but without any realistic way to do that. I’m sure we’d love a bit more actual control in the middle of the park, but a midfielder that would guarantee that control is probably well beyond our budget or already in the building if only we could unlock more of his underlying quality in more games. Thankfully, in Axel Tuanzebe last season there is at least some precedent for McKenna rehabilitating a player in that fashion, just in time for the run-in.

Verdict: Probably no-one and cross our fingers Phillips kicks on, because I suspect we wouldn’t otherwise sign anyone to displace Morsy or Cajuste.

Forwards

Refreshing the forward line does feel like the main priority. It’s not that our Summer squad-building went wrong exactly. Indeed, quite a lot of our forwards probably exceeded my pre-season expectations. Obviously Liam Delap has been a revelation, but Sam Szmodics, Conor Chaplin and Nathan Broadhead have also hit the optimistic end of expectations.

The trouble is it hasn’t quite been enough. As it stands we aren’t scoring enough goals. Just one a game isn’t enough to keep us up, even if we continue keeping half our opponents to that crucial 0 or 1 goal. On their way to 36 points Nottingham Forest’s defence last year was only roughly as good as ours is now but we’re scoring 18 per cent fewer goals.

It isn’t terribly surprising that this is where we need a boost. Finding forwards who hurt Premier League teams is one of the toughest parts of recruiting for a promoted team. We seem to have found two players that are a real individual threat at this level – Hutchinson and Delap – plus a clutch of other forwards who are contributing, but it feels to me like we need one more that is a real weapon one-on-one, just to take the option of double-marking Hutchinson off the table.

There have been signs in the last couple of games that Nathan Broadhead could be that player. In the squad of fast, strong athletes we have built Broadhead has a vision, a delicacy of touch and a degree of composure that is far from universal. It’s something different and certainly gave Chelsea and Fulham a lot of trouble. You can understand though why McKenna might prefer not to 100 per cent rely on that kind of impact on a regular basis. Even at lower levels, Broadhead had a tendency to drift out of games, particularly away from home and sometimes when targeted by a very physical defensive midfielder. Okay Yokuşlu gave him an especially hard time when we played West Brom last season, for instance. So I can see why another lightning dribbler – Jaden Philogene – seems to be an imminent arrival.

Philogene’s arrival won’t hurt numbers-wise either. Although with Jack Clarke, Sam Szmodics, Nathan Broadhead and now Jaden Philogene we look rather over-subscribed in the “inside left” position, we are short in terms of forwards in general. McKenna looks to use six players in the three non-striker roles in the majority of games. We currently have 8 including nominal right back Ben Johnson. So, a normal matchday squad is probably one injury away from all of them at least making the bench. Philogene coming in gives us options, wherever we play him (and we might try and play him in any or all of the three forward roles). Another right winger – Middlesbrough loanee Ben Doak or Wolfsburg’s Patrick Wimmer – might also be on the cards.

The other obvious one to get done is a striker. McKenna has been a lot kinder about Ali Al-Hamadi’s readiness for Premier League football than a lot of Ipswich fans have been. There’s been speculation that Al-Hamadi is struggling with an ongoing injury, but watching his inexplicably bad penalty against Bristol Rovers my diagnosis was “imposter syndrome”. Here’s a footballer who never made an EFL appearance until he was 20, was let go by Wycombe Wanderers just two years ago and was playing League Two football last season. He doesn’t feel like he deserves to be in the Premier League and it has messed with his head to the point where he’s struggling even in games against more limited opposition.

McKenna’s system requires two big strikers to share 90 or so minutes of frenetic pressing and channel running. One of our two big strikers (George Hirst) picks up more than his fair share of injuries, leaving the other one (Liam Delap) with a workload that potentially puts him in danger of getting an injury. So there needs to be a third and it can’t be poor Ali Al-Hamadi right now. So the question is what can you get as that third striker?

Ipswich have form for being ambitious to the point of delusion in sourcing strikers. In Summer 2022 we pursued George Hirst for too long and ended up short. In Summer 2023 we looked around for ages before getting the wholly inadequate Dane Scarlett late in August. In Summer 2024 we pursued Armando Broja for an age, despite his initial disinterest and later injury recurrence, switched too late to Emmanuel Latte Lath and ended up one short. Ambition is great but if we’d pragmatically gone out and got a journeyman Premier League striker (Odsonne Edouard and Steve Mounie were two that were mentioned), who could physically compete and hold their own at the level, I suspect we would have a few more points than we do.

Verdict: I suspect we’ll end getting Philogene and a striker. The striker will be someone experienced and slightly underwhelming, who nevertheless fits the system. The right wing back/winger may well have to wait for the Summer.