This is not an Inquest

Well, it’s a long time since we’ve been made to feel like that, hasn’t it? There were a few away defeats last season but in truth they all felt like games we could have won. There were two early losses under McKenna where we were pretty toothless, but they were very much part of a “transitional period”. You probably have to go back to the Paul Cook era and the fairly effortless shoeing we got from Paul Warne’s Rotherham for this kind of kicking. Sure we’ve dropped points before and now and then we’ve even played badly, but more or less 99 of Kieran McKenna’s first 100 games were at worst close games, decided by fine margins, rather than a more rounded defeat. Is it even worth asking why this one happened, given the context? It has been so long that I’m not sure I remember how to do inquests anymore. As I recall, I have to nominate a scapegoat and demand we switch to a four four effing two? Something like that anyway.

What to say about it? Well, it was pretty much a catalogue of disasters from start to finish. West Brom have scored first in five home games and have won all five. There are not many worse places to concede from the opposition’s first (possibly inadvertent) shot on target. We consistently get first contact on set pieces but not this one, where we let Darnell Furlong run onto Nathan Broadhead. Not Broady’s game. Once we’d survived another five minutes of pressure we got a bit of purchase in the game, but of the sort that only does you any good if you’re not already losing. Hladky-Burgess-Davis was a road to nowhere. The Woolfenden-Williams axis not much more progressive. Only when Hladky managed to pierce the screen through to Jack Taylor and work the ball rightwards towards Burns and Chaplin did it look there was any route forward.

Mostly though our attempts to get up the pitch succumbed to successive swarms of enormous, energetic Baggies, who were ready at a moment’s notice to take not just the football off poor cherubic Nathan Broadhead, but also his phone, wallet and shoes too. When we did manage to escape the clutches of Yokuslu, Bartley and Furlong on one side and Mowatt, Cipre and Townsend on the other, we made bad, often bizarre decisions, like the sudden scarcity of opportunities to make choices in attacking areas had driven us mad. Davis and Hirst played a lovely one-two, but Davis thought the best use of a rare shooting position was a rather unconvincing dive. Burns won the ball high and made one of the worst pass selections in human history. You might think Jack Taylor the ideal end point for a short corner and shot routine, but he leant back and punted the ball high into the stands.

We got thirty minutes of West Brom’s mid-block, by which time your Birminghams and your Rotherhams might be desperate for a half-time breather. The Baggies were still very much boinging though and let us know the energy levels were just fine thank you very much with a flurry of shots just before half time. We often sprint to the tunnel at the break as a show of bravado, but there was no kidding anyone this time. Fifteen minutes to ponder whether McKenna had any tricks up his sleeve (and it very much looked like a trick was required) and how much exactly you’d need to pay in January for a serious footballer like Jed Wallace to propel us over the line. We came out looking like we had a point to prove, but let ourselves pretty much instantly get murdered in transition, before playing out another forty minutes or so like a beaten team, an almost entirely new experience under McKenna.

I suppose we might have expected a few more of these days in the Championship so far, given the step up in opposition. Perhaps they might have materialised more often if the likes of Sunderland had scored from early chances. What should we learn? Getting thoroughly out-played and not mustering a single shot on target is so unusual for us that probably isn’t the main concern. There will be times where it’s just a matter of execution on the day, not about the plan or the personnel, and we probably don’t need to worry that Broadhead and Chaplin will never touch a football in the opposition penalty area ever again.

I wonder though, if we might have needed a bit of a lesson in away day humility. It is hard when you’re undefeated on the road and you’ve raced away to 39 points from 16 games to recognise that you are still the underdog in a lot of your games. Our best road trips this season – Sunderland, Southampton, Bristol City – have been about graft. They’ve been built on keeping our bit of the scoreboard blank for most of the game and letting the pressure gently build on the home side, letting them spend emotional and physical energy chasing the game. The games where we’ve dominated the ball – QPR, Huddersfield, Rotherham – have been far tougher going.

As supporters and maybe as a team, I wonder if we might need to avoid approaching games with a “second-in-the-league” mindset. At Sunderland and Southampton especially, it felt like we knew we’d be up against it, that we shouldn’t expect to dominate. That typically brings a bit more intensity when defending and a bit more determination to capitalise during rarer attacks. That kind of energy is what we’ll have to bring to upcoming trips to Watford and Middlesbrough, where a care-free Portman Road mindset might get us punished. Did we aim for a fast start at West Brom, would we have been better off concentrating on slowing their start? Did we prioritise Jack Taylor’s flashier gifts over Massimo Luongo’s grit?

Got to say though, it’s pretty thin stuff to bring to the struggle session. Stop conceding early goals isn’t a meaningful bit of coaching advice, nor is “defend with a bit more intensity”. It felt like West Brom physically overawed us at times, but they’re not the first team we’ve faced in the Championship comprised of big ole units (maybe the best of them though), so I don’t necessarily expect that to be representative of a wider flaw. They matched us up for a shape and set out to frustrate us playing through the thirds, but a fair few teams have done that too and we’ve worked it out. I’m looking for systemic critiques here and coming up empty. Does that mean it was just a blip?

Perhaps it just means that at some point last season Kieran McKenna killed the bit of my brain that thought it knew better than every Ipswich manager ever and I can’t (and don’t want to) revive it. The last nine months of just crushing everything in our path has destroyed my critical faculties, such that I implicitly trust everything he does and now think everything will always, ultimately, turn out alright. I just don’t how to write disparagingly about us anymore! It is nice to feel like this, if slightly unsettling, slightly unnatural. Maybe this is what it’s like to be in a cult?