Not Very Christmassy

Round about this time last year I settled into my seat in the The Plough for Leeds United vs. Ipswich Town. We led the Whites by a decent whack in the league table and had been a little unfortunate to lose to them at a Portman Road. In my lucky Ipswich Christmas socks, I had no inkling of the disastrous forty-five minutes that awaited me. Barely a shot on target, an own goal, a penalty, a set-piece concession and Leeds so dominant there wasn’t even much room to feel sorry for ourselves. Some days you don’t get the rub of the green and lose. Some days the other team are clearly superior and you lose. Some days it’s both and you get tonked.

Having declared last week that competing well was close to giving me an aneurysm, Newcastle decided to ensure that my heart rate remained under control by having this one out of sight by half time. With hindsight they likely already had it won by 4.55pm the previous Saturday, when referee Simon Hooper decided Liam Delap was partially culpable for Wolves’ indiscipline. Newcastle, with their wingers high, wide and aggressive, their midfield suffocating and brutal like a pillow applied to a coma patient, their backline big, looming and front footed, were just a terrible matchup for a team without a target man.

This was all hindsight of course, before the game I was innocently assuming we’d be competitive like usual, even that the surprise of Sammie Szmodics up top might mess with Newcastle’s plans. Out of necessity, we named the smallest possible front line and it all went exactly as it might have done in your worst nightmares. Any hopes of getting on the front foot dashed by a peculiar kick off routine where our entire left flank sprinted forward just in time to see Conor Chaplin sweep the hall out for a throw in on the other side. The ball quickly made its way back to their side, then up and over Cameron Burgess and into an offside looking (but alas not offside being) Jacob Murphy. Murphy is one of those players who, like Michail Antonio, I had filed as “just a decent Premier League player” in my EFL innocence, but who in reality would have been the best winger we faced in league football in any of our previous 20 seasons.

On Saturday he had a day, where even the first unthreatening cross he spammed into the penalty area found its way eventually to Alexander Isak, who just drilled it into the ground and into the goal via Muric’s left hand. Later, he launched an absolute ping in off the cross bar having found himself the free man as Anthony Gordon meandered unmolested round our penalty area. Finally, he was found executing an improbable back heel assist for Alexander Isak to score his third (he wasn’t involved in Isak’s second but the less said about that one the better). Nothing he tried didn’t come off.

Whilst Murphy (and Isak) had a day, I suspect Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes might have proven unplayable on any day for any version of Ipswich Town 2024-25. Saturday’s iteration, striker-less and shorn of the ability to bypass these two ravenous magpies, certainly had no answer to their athleticism, industry or technical ability. There have been some very impressive centre midfield performances against us this season. Ryan Gravenberch eventually ran the show for Liverpool in August and Brighton’s Carlos Baleba was outstanding at the Amex Stadium. I’ve still seen nothing to match these two yet. One volley pass from Guimaraes actually drew a gasp from the home fans. Omari Hutchinson will probably never be more effortlessly shackled in his entire career - Tonali was all over him.

This was all the worst possible combination. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, every pre-match worry you had manifested in front you. Everything we tried played out in exactly the ways Newcastle would’ve hoped. The Magpies handed out a brutal hammering for an hour, then took their foot off the gas.

It was a result that seemed to unleash a lot of soul searching amongst Ipswich fans. Yet whilst it certainly wasn’t a particularly festive afternoon, it did not weigh anywhere near as heavily on me as the Bournemouth game did. My seat neighbour Iain remarked at full time that he’d “never seen me as crestfallen as last Saturday” but I seemed to be taking Saturday’s shoeing in relatively good spirits.

My view was broadly that anyone who did not expect us to get the odd battering this season was deluding themselves. Indeed, we have probably taken fewer of these than I imagined we would in the Summer. Get us on a bad day and opposition on a good one and we will lose, especially when we’re missing key personnel (and absentees count double when you start with a weaker squad).

From here, the aim can’t be to never get beaten badly again (just as well, because we probably have two more of these coming right up). No, the real challenge for us is two-fold. The first part is minimising how many of those bad performances we put in and the number of days we don’t compete in. The count on that front thus far is five from seventeen, so we are actually doing OK in that one. The second part is claiming as many points as we can from those that are within our grasp, something we’re struggling a bit more with. Thus far we’ve managed 12 points from 12 even (admittedly some only even-ish) games, that’s a lot of points (too many) left on the table. It’s Bournemouth (and Fulham, Villa, Man U, Brentford) that’s got us in the bottom three, not Newcastle, Everton or West Ham.

Still, there’s hope in that scenario. As I noted last December, it is tempting to feel like a shellacking like this just exposes “what we really are”. But just like that Leeds hammering didn’t mean we were destined to fall off and wasn’t our “norm”, the particular ways Newcastle pulled us apart won’t apply in every game, neither in terms of how particular calamitous moments panned out, nor in the way their specific strengths met our specific weaknesses. Certainly, we are up against it in this league and should have no illusions about that. We’re certainly favourites to fail, but we are still in this fight and given everyone’s fixtures we will almost certainly still be in it come the New Year.

We might not be feeling very Christmassy right now but all is not lost.