Persist

For a moment there I thought everything was going to be just like last year. The symmetries with last season kept piling up. New signings and a kindly February fixture list had been a springboard for an imperious run of wins which didn't quite get us clear of equally consistent rivals. As we swatted Sheffield Wednesday aside, it was very familiar, very much "beware Ipswich after Valentine's Day".

The last three games reminded me that football rarely gives you the same plot twice. 2022-23 was a John Wick movie. A revenge thriller, where Ipswich went on an exhilarating rampage, doling out efficient and spectacular violence to anyone who had wronged us during our four-year stay in League One. Wycombe, Burton, Accrington, you shouldn't have made us angry.

This year is beginning to feel more like a bad game of snooker. Leeds, Leicester and Ipswich have all had opportunities to polish off the remaining balls, with the other promotion contenders helplessly watching on from their seats, but continue to watch their most important shots rattle around the pocket and refuse to drop. We are all stumbling along, playing mediocre football, interspersed with moments of desperate intensity as we scramble to put together enough results to stay in contention. If any of them could find that killer blow, if they could find it in themselves to just scratch that one extra win, the other two are playing badly enough that one team could quickly make things quite comfortable for themselves.

After Tuesday Night, I got ahead of myself. With Leeds and Leicester stuffing up against Sunderland and Millwall respectively, I had an alluring vision of two easy home victories in a week (hopefully accompanied by a few more setbacks for our rivals before we played again), leaving us nearly home and hosed by the time we kicked off at Hull. We could apply the coup de grace at the KCom, have a Ska Party in Coventry and Harry Clarke would still be nursing his well-deserved hangover by the time Game 46 rolled around.   

Instead, against Watford we completed a slightly disconcerting 8-day rollercoaster. Accustomed now to the sort of steamroller campaign we saw last season, we might have to re-calibrate for a run-in that’s increasingly becoming a bit of nervous crawl towards victory for all parties. Last Tuesday Southampton looked fresher and more capable than us, before we produced a breathless last 30 minutes to win the game, more an act of collective will than anything else. Afterwards, I left feeling slightly hysterical, ecstatic in a way that’s basically inexplicable to anyone who has never been a regular match-going football fan.  This was followed by some pure misery on Saturday. I’d never been to Carrow Road before, I am not anxious to go back.

We had gone to the top of the big dipper and then plunged to the bottom, so I suppose it’s only natural that we hit a mundane bit of track on Wednesday Night. Watford played a peculiar role in events, producing one of the most risk-averse performances I have seen at Portman Road all season, despite their season having long-since drifted beyond any meaningful jeopardy. They vacillated between passive control of the ball and compact defence, shackles decisively still in place, even on the beach. This extended even to keeping the ball in the corner from their final attacking set piece. You suspect any goal we’d managed to score would have gone unanswered, but the longer it continued at 0-0, the more obstinate Watford became.

Fair enough, no-one is obliged to play an open game for our convenience, I suppose. We had the chances to win it, Kieffer Moore’s first half header the most presentable, but not so many that scoring became inevitable. Thankfully the defence, probably the least knackered part of the squad, held firm enough, because a point was still worth taking.

We roll on from Watford to Middlesbrough feeling a bit sorry for ourselves. I probably wouldn’t have predicted that after Jeremy Sarmiento’s last kick of the game magic last week, but I probably should have. In truth, all three games could have gone either way, so four points was fair enough.

How have we got here? Of late, the periods of play where we simply overwhelm the opposition with attacking intensity seem to be a bit rarer and bit shorter in duration. Some of that might be missing personnel (get well soon Wes Burns), but a lot of it just has to be fatigue. Forty-two games in, we’ve accumulated all the wins and points you’d ordinarily need to get you over the promotion line. In a normal season we’d be doing victory laps and losing unimportant dead rubbers at this point. Yet here we are, 24 miles into our 26.2 mile marathon, and Leeds and Leicester are still there. Now it feels like a case of one foot going in front of the other, acceleration is probably off the table.

This might mean adjusting expectations. Explosive Ipswich, where there’s 6 or more goals in every home game, might not be seen for a little while. Things could get a bit more… attritional. Four more tight games to come. We know we’ll compete in all of them, we know none of them are gimmes and we know the eleven on the pitch will need whatever energy us lot can give them. This is no sprint over the line, but we won’t care if we’re the ones that finally stumble over it.