The University of Ipswich Town

11^th January, 2021

Keanan Bennetts stands by the touch line. Behind him, 10 rows deep in a single tier, lie the COVID-emptied seats of Accrington Stanley’s Crown Ground. Over the chattering buzz of the players, the loud, erratic voice of Paul Cook can be heard. “HIGHER, HIGHER!”

Luke Chambers nudges the ball into Bennetts’ right in-step. Accrington’s rangy left back Cameron Burgess looks to get tight but is too slow for Bennetts, who knocks the ball past his left foot and into space. The Ipswich winger is away from him. Burgess, body shape all wrong, grasps with instinctive hands, catches a little of Bennetts’ shirt. Free kick, yellow card…

There are different ways of feeling proud about your football club. You might draw satisfaction from supporting a big team that actually wins things, if you can look past who is bankrolling it. Your team might conduct its transfer business so well that their achievements far out-strip their modest resources, leaving you swollen with pride at the proficiency of your recruitment team’s data analytics. Your sense of local spirit might also soar seeing your academy regularly produce prodigious home-grown talents.

16^th October, 2021

George Williams barely looks up. He can feel two bodies bearing down on him as addresses the ball deep in his own half. The game is quickly getting away from Cambridge United as Ipswich push for a third goal. No time to do anything other than hammer the ball forward.

The ball sails over Matt Penney and Shilow Tracey on the half-way line, dropping vaguely in the direction of Cameron Burgess. He looks well-positioned to meet it before the wily Joe Ironside nudges him ever so slightly forward. Burgess is falling, then flailing, then appealing, arms outstretched, as the home crowd roars and Ironside scampers away goalwards…

I like to think over the past couple of years Ipswich have given us something different to be proud of. Much of the focus has gone on tactical innovation and collective patterns of play, but we have also quietly become a club specialising in life-long footballer learning. Something less like an academy and more like a University of Football.

It is fairly common for football teams to find and develop youth. Every team signs kids in the expectation that they will improve with more match experience. However, as players enter the second half of their twenties the general expectation is that their skill level will plateau and whatever footballer they are now is what they are. At Ipswich that received wisdom does not apply. Players have hit standards you never believed possible for them, unlocking and refining new aspects of their game, even as they enter their second decade as a professional footballer. Cameron Burgess, Wes Burns and Sam Morsy are just some of the players transformed in unexpected ways.

8^th March, 2022

Bersant Celina waits to take his corner. In the penalty area, the players of Lincoln City and Ipswich Town jostle for the ball. Amongst them the broadest, tallest target, George Edmundson. He’s trying to wrestle his way to the back post as the ball is floated over. He leaps highest and meets the ball, but buffeted by defenders he can control neither his header nor his landing. He screams in anguish as his ankle buckles…

Football is a wasteful business, so it feels good and a little unique to be a club that values and develops people, that looks to educate rather than always replace. A club where you can follow players through their career and take pride as your club helps them become something they weren’t.

13^th September, 2022

Groggy. The blurry figures of the two Ipswich physios and the fourth officials] slowly come into focus. Concerned faces in the front row of seats, those fans close enough to feel and sense the full impact. Cameron spitting blood on the ground by the dugout. What was it? A slide tackle into a 50-50 and a knee to the eye socket? Something innocuous-looking like that. Applause rattling around his aching skull as he walks gingerly towards the tunnel, two steadying hands on his back, needed to keep him upright…

In any given year most football clubs fail in their objectives and then set about applying eye-watering sums of money to fix the problem. Cash flows in and out of football clubs, through players and agents. Ipswich under Paul Cook were no exception. Cameron Burgess was the fifteenth of the nineteen signings that Ipswich made in the “Demolition Man” Summer of 2021. For £750,000, we got the 2020-21 League One leader for headed clearances, a “proper professional” (Accrington chairman, Andy Holt) and “great balance and experience” (Paul Cook). He was not Cook’s first choice. Ipswich had pursued a free agent move for Luton Town captain Sonny Bradley for much of the Summer before he renewed with the Hatters. 

12^th March, 2023

Pushing and shoving. Leif Davis is raising his arm over by the corner flag. Marcus Harness is the filling in a sandwich, Cameron Burgess one side and three Bolton defenders the other. Leif sets everything in motion. Harness spreads his arms wide, blocking any motion toward his teammate. Cameron takes one loping stride to his left. By the time Davis reaches the ball he’s accelerating towards the goal, his markers trapped.

Davis’ delivery is loopy, curling ever so slightly away from the goal line. As it falls out of the air towards the six-yard line, Burgess is leaping, meeting the ball at the top of his jump, one of those emphatic connections that you think you can hear, even when you can’t. THUD, SKOOSH. Triumphant, Burgess, arms spread, salutes one tier of empty seats and another higher up full of joyous limbs…

The river of pounds teams invest in players each year rarely remedies their situation, so every window more faulty parts will be discarded, more millions written off. After going straight into the team, in the wake of Ipswich surrendering a two-goal lead against Cambridge United, Burgess was dropped for Toto Nsiala. Cook added him to his list of potential January sales.

Cook’s sacking came in time to prevent that disaster, yet Burgess only really established himself as a main starter after he returned from a horrendous facial injury against Bristol Rovers in September 2022. Even then, memories of those clumsy early performances stuck to him long after his mid-career glow-up. He was slated for replacement both subsequent summers.

23^rd September, 2023

George Hirst is wheeling away from the South Stand goal. At first his arms are spread, then as he nears the away fans in the Upper Tier of the Cobbold Stand, he cups his ears. Moments before he had scored Ipswich’s third goal of the afternoon, running on to a long pass and slipping the ball under Aynsley Pears. Another fine assist for Leif Davis, you thought briefly, before checking your memory.

No. It was Cameron Burgess, deliberately dawdling before launching an aerial ball that perfectly bisected goalkeeper, right back and centre back. Hirst’s first touch was the poke through Pears’ legs…

Signed as a head-it-kick-it defender, he initially looked clumsy and slow on the turn. Already 25 by the time he arrived, 27 when he established himself as a regular starter, Big Cam was way too far into his career to become something else entirely. Yet he did. As a defender, the way he read the game, the way he positioned himself and even the way he moved his body all turned him into something else. In that first League One season you worried every time he got isolated with space in behind. By the time we got to the Premier League we had him defending 15 yards into the opposition half.

30^th April 2024

Loitering again. Looming over Ellis Simms. Winning first contact. Putting it in an area. Fighting for a loose ball. George Edmundson falling in front of him. Clearing the ball from his feet. Slashing at it. Sending it anywhere vaguely goalwards. The caress of the keeper’s left palm. A thud onto the inside of the right-hand post. The ripple of the net. A big man in Orange, his arms spread wide, skipping and bellowing into a knot of hugs…

On the ball, it was easy to look like the blocker to Woolfie’s playmaker, but over time Burgess looked ever more comfortable in possession. The zipped flat pass out to Leif Davis and the curved lofted through ball into the channel for George Hirst became the signature moves, but he did the simple stuff well too, short passes into midfield runners. In amongst all the multi-pass counter attacking moves that became Ipswich’s calling card in the third and then second tiers, there are invariably a few simple, productive passes from Burgess. He was part of everything Ipswich became.

24^th November 2024

Out steps Mazraoui. Bruno Fernandes lurks at the centre of a little triangle of Ipswich players. Picking up a pocket, as they say. Mazraoui thinks better of the pass and works it back and forth with Amad Diallo to his right. The triangle pushes forward. Higher and higher, oceans of space in behind.

Fernandes heads backwards, deep into his own half, trying to find his pocket again, but pursued by Burgess. Though the space is shrinking, this time Mazraoui plays the pass. Maybe Fernandes thinks his marker is too tight, perhaps he thinks he’s too good for this guy. He goes for the first time backheel chop. Burgess’ distances are immaculate though. He reads the chop, he sticks out a left boot, he stops Fernandes and rolls the ball forward, setting another attack in motion…

The star pupil, a vindication of Kieran McKenna’s approach to football, the purest embodiment of the club’s approach to squad building and development over the past three years. The gold standard for the kind of player education that is surely the future of this club. Cameron Burgess, graduate of the University of Ipswich Town.