Something changed

By the time Kieran McKenna was appointed Ipswich manager on the 16th December 2021, Ipswich had been fully toxic for weeks. At the beginning of the month, Paul Cook was dismissed after an FA cup draw with League Two Barrow. Rumours circulated about dysfunction behind the scenes with Cook later claiming that he’d never been “in control of his own destiny” at the club, and that recruitment, fitness and performance decisions had been imposed on him from above. Five days later, we hit our absolute nadir away at Charlton. A 2-0 defeat that could have been anything. A structureless blob of a team, huffing and scowling its way round the pitch. Our London aways are often highly strung and a few disgraced themselves at full time. Intoxication and fury at maximum, a handful of fans abused Toto Nsiala and physically attacked Christian Walton.

Watching that scene unfold was, I think, my lowest moment in 30 years as an Ipswich fan. Relegations are painful, but come with a sort of restorative melancholy, a sense of defiance, of the possibility that out of adversity might spring renewal and hope. It is grinding towards nowhere for years on end that kills you as a football fan. By December 2021, we’d been inexplicably meandering towards the middle of League One for two and a half years. Under Marcus Evans’ ownership, we at least had the excuse of an incompetent and unambitious owner, though in truth even his version of Ipswich Town should have been too powerful for the third tier.

By that point, following the Blues had been a curse for nearly two decades. You had this persistent feeling that any mild positive would somehow end in tears, like when our best season in years culminated in the most devastating play-off defeat imaginable or when we went miles clear in 2019 only to finish the season lucky to get 9th. That we continued to tread water even with Gamechanger bankrolling the club seemed beyond belief, like failure was so ingrained that no decision, no resources, no structure, no new manager could possibly change it.

Over the next week, the conversation about who should permanently replace Paul Cook was fraught and uncertain. Neil Harris’ name circulated without much enthusiasm. A more positive performance away at promotion-bound Wigan Athletic made interim manager John McGreal favourite for some. Others continued to gripe about Cook only getting 9 months. News came through that we might be looking to give a first manager job to a young coach from an elite team, with the names Anthony Barry and Kieran McKenna doing the rounds. Within 24 hours, we learned it would be the latter, then Manchester United’s assistant manager.

How do you process that kind of appointment as a supporter? Hiring a new manager feels like more luck than judgement at the best of times, but with an experienced guy like Cook, you can examine his record, assess previous jobs and tot up promotions. You can dream about playing like this team or worry about failing like that team. With this kind of wildcard, everyone just projects their orientation towards the world. The pessimists will fret about inexperience. They’ll fixate on negative testimony, of which Manchester United fans offered plenty, mostly around his inability to inspire their elite players with his “PE teacher” style. The optimists will find comfort in the genre of appointment, they always wanted a young, progressive, modern coach and he must have something about him to work for such prestigious clubs.

Hiring McKenna was the kind of decision where you simply had to throw yourself on the mercy of the club hierarchy. There’s no eye test and no data that could give you a flavour of what kind of manager he was. You had to trust CEO Mark Ashton’s judgement, that the interview and the references he’d received had told him what he needed to know, that this person would thrive taking charge of a historic club in a coma, with all the baggage and danger that would bring. Was it knowledge? Was it gut feeling? Was it just a roll of the dice? Even Ashton could not have imagined what a masterstroke he’d pulled off.

Whatever it was, that day, without us knowing it, something changed, forever. At the time, I remember praying that he get a good start. I think we forget sometimes how precarious those first few months must have been. An absolute rookie, inheriting a group of players who’d expected to walk the league but then in shock at how badly it had gone. Many of them had succeeded previously under his predecessor and would’ve been sorry to see Cook go. The danger of them deciding this young man with no playing experience did not know what he was talking about must have been high. Winning early and winning lots was crucial to getting any buy in. 

Early McKenna proved to be adaptable and pragmatic, skills that we’ve needed this season too. There was something fitting about facing the absolute archetype of a League One side – Gareth Ainsworth’s Wycombe Wanderers – first up. Direct, organised, athletic, relentless, brutal, more skilled than you think they’re going to be. We lined up in John McGreal’s 3-5-2 and scored late in the first half, Morsy’s shot rebounding onto James Norwood. Wycombe put us under a lot of pressure second half, but Hladky (deputising for the injured Christian Walton) gave a surprisingly assured performance and Anthony Stewart lashed a presentable chance over the bar. 11th versus 5th in League One. Only 7 shots to their 12, but one-nil Ipswich.

The performance wasn’t terribly characteristic of what we would become under McKenna, even if there was already some of the defensive resolve that has served us well in the 9 narrow away wins we’ve accumulated this season. The line-up was though, with 10 of the matchday squad that evening claiming promotion medals last Saturday. For so long, I’d wanted a manager who focused on improving the players we had, after various guys who seemed to regard themselves as simply glorified recruitment specialists whenever anything went wrong. More players, different players, the solution to everything.

Whilst we certainly weren’t playing electrifying football all the time in early 2022 (though some of it was still very good), what quickly became very clear was the kind of person and public figure Kieran McKenna was. The longevity of many of the players he inherited reflects a kindness to him that I’ve never known in an Ipswich manager or in football more generally. Not a shallow “niceness” that simply wants to say positive things about everyone, but a genuine investment in seeing what people can be and helping them to become that, a refusal to throw people away as a shortcut to success, coupled to the patience of a real teacher.

No Ipswich manager has ever reassured me more after failure. On the rare occasions that we messed up, by the time I’d finished with the post-match press conference I already felt better about it. No Ipswich manager has ever taught me more about the game I love, ever trusted his supporters with such detailed explanations about the way the team does things and why or given me the same sense of how our collective mood might contribute to it succeeding or failing.

Sometimes my more materialist brain rebels against the idea that one man could change everything so completely. After last season, you could say McKenna was a fine manager, who’d built an exciting team, but you could also point to structural financial reasons why a club like Ipswich wouldn’t stay in League One forever. Eventually the wage bill always tells. Far lesser managers have smashed the third tier to absolute bits, not least both his predecessors at other clubs.

As of 2024, that line of reasoning is gone. There was nothing, nothing at all, that dictated we should finish 2nd with 96 points. Our promoted squad was comprised of discards from middling Championship teams like Morsy, Luongo, Chaplin, Hirst and Edmundson, lower league journeymen too far into their careers to really succeed at the top of the second tier like Hladky, Burgess, Burns, Taylor, Harness and Jackson, elite academy drop-outs like Davis, Clarke and Broadhead, youngsters on first loans like Omari Hutchinson, who every club takes a punt on, only to find them overwhelmed by big, packed-out stadiums and grizzled, experienced opponents. In August, it looked no stronger to me than most of the other 19 Championship squads built without parachute payments and weaker than some of them. The size of the wage bill always tells and ours was likely a quarter of the size of the three relegated clubs, half the size of the other two teams getting additional broadcast revenues.   

Yet the team Kieran McKenna has made is extraordinary. Extraordinary, not just because it wins a lot (which is remarkable enough given the opposition) but also because it feels like four successful football teams rolled into one. At our most controlled, Ipswich is a game management machine. It divines gaps and overloads, works them, takes its prizes, finds more holes, works them too, reduces the opposition to pure impotence.

For a sunny 3pm kick off at Portman Road it can also make beautiful chaos, with games that are, as NTT20 put it, “like being forced to dance a high-speed salsa with someone who knows the moves better than you”. Attacks rage like electrical storms. Players fly forwards, everything happens fast and precise, the counter-press is co-ordinated and hungry. Maybe, you can hurt the home team in transition, but you’re never actually in control.

On far flung away days on grey afternoons you see yet another team. We can be determined, persistent, attritional. The reckless abandon of Portman Road gives way to something more prosaic. No-one in this team is above chasing, harrying, digging in, clearing out, finding the one fine margin goal and protecting it with body and soul.

Sometimes, things went wrong, we played badly, the opposition looked in total control and sat comfortably on a lead. Then the fourth Ipswich team showed up, reinforced itself with a few judicious substitions, then suddenly wrested every ounce of momentum left in the game. One second the game was totally in the opposition team’s grasp, the next they’re penned into their penalty area and every remaining minute is experienced as ten. Sometimes late in games it was like we had two extra players.

Every version feels like the product of something McKenna fixed. The resilient away team was born in December 2021, the remedy to Paul Cook’s confused defensive patterns. The game management machine appeared somewhere in Spring 2022, when we went 15 matches without conceding an equaliser. The electric attack took its final form only from February 2023, after the Valentine’s Day stalemate in Bristol. In hindsight, making Accrington, Morecambe and Forest Green play against the front five of Davis-Broadhead-Hirst-Chaplin-Burns was cruel.

The late game surge is a recent invention. We had no need of it in League One and until this season had never scored a winning goal after the 80th minute under McKenna. We have now done so four times this calendar year. If there are two things you need from a manager when you rise to a division of giants, it’s the ability to improve your players and the ability to adapt to different challenges. Without question, McKenna will be the club’s trump card next season.

It is easy to get carried away about a manager in the wake of a promotion. McKenna is not the first to be declared a messiah after catching lightning-in-a-bottle for a single season. Yet, turning this club around in the first place was a bigger deal than the mere fact of finishing second in League One and then the Championship would indicate. That feeling that failure was always just round the corner, that surely we would find a way to mess up soon, was something astonishingly hard to disperse. I don’t think that sense of cynicism and apprehension truly dissipated for me until this season. It was only recently that I truly trusted that there was no sucker punch round the corner. Last month, when the Norwich fans sang “we’re all going to have a party when Ipswich fuck this up” I just knew that we’d be shoving that back down their throats.

I am convinced that Kieran McKenna is a generational talent. This is not just a miraculous conjunction of things, nor just an ephemeral moment where everything happened to go right. I believe that not just because this team is brilliant and we’ve achieved something incredible. I believe it because of who he is. I think it’s something to do with his calmness, his bearing, his demeanour. I still felt it even when we were struggling slightly in early 2023. His appointment has changed everything.

Ipswich, like a lot of provincial English towns, can spend a lot of time feeling sorry for itself, fixating on its flaws. There’s a tone to neighbourhood-facebook-mithering and pub-moaning that makes it seem like everything is going to the dogs, where the town is imagined as ever more marginal and decaying and that’s all there is to know about the place. It’s amazing how football punctures that, how it makes your community feel special and puts your collective sense of self back together.

Mid-way through Saturday’s second half, as it became more and more certain that we’d achieved this momentous thing and I fought back tears, I felt such enormous warmth and pride towards Ipswich, the club, the town, the community. Football is so central to the civic culture in places like Ipswich and these moments mean everything. Kieran McKenna, his staff and his players, have given us that. If he and they give us nothing more (and I don't think they're anywhere near done yet), my gratitude would still be eternal. The day he arrived something changed.