I suppose tha tfew even of those who take no interest at all in Football will be likely to have heard of the mysterious penalty gremlin that has now frustrated all the England's team's attempts to seek glory for twenty years.
I myself thought that commentators sounded rather hollow and unconvincing when they got carried away by the so called teen sensation Wayne Rooney neglecting to comment on the fact that two three goal victories was very good on paper but in practice had been achieved against second string opposition. I don't mean to take anything away from a young man obviously enjoying himself but I in general I doubt that many of the international press took quite the same view of his performance in the France game and rather imagine that he was depicted by quite a few as little less than a troublemsome lout who got lucky: the result of that game of course speaks for itself. Does anyone think it politically incorrect to point out that there is a certain irony in watching an international fixture between two European nations descend into such a debacle inasmuch as most of the players were literally non-european for most of the game? Doubtless there will be those who will cry 'racist' just for pointing this out but I think it is a fair comment in some ways that shall we say concepts of national identity have become submerged in political correctness in the way that athletic immigrant players from comparatively tough social backgrounds have come to dominate this international sporting arena. I don't say this is good or bad just that it is a fact that athletic individuals with any sort of distinct immgrant bagkround don't play as well as a team as those individuals with a more homogenous cultural identity. A lot of people are keen to avoid the question of course and it will be interesting to see how France far against temas of ethnic Scandinavians and Slavs in the remainder of the competition. I suppose I have in mind some of the comments that have been made about the nature of the domestic game such as the slip of the tongue which cost Ron Atkinson a few media contracts recently and the obvious fact in Britain and France particularly with their colonial heritage that the interest of the domestic audience does in fact become that much less if the game simply becomes a profit based professional, mercenary contest rather than a sport which reflects more deeply fundamental notions of national and civic identity. It certainly is a a question many are keen to avoid and it will be interesting to see how the domestic game continues to react in coming years. Insofar as it might be fair to say that such a question isn't being conronted; does anyone think I'm right in noting that Leeds United's decline might be associated with some decision to use immigrant players more sparingly? Or that Millwall's good Cup run this year might be associated with the same idea? I suppose that many dusky hued Britons would be forced to concede some of this and in answer to those who the question is best avoided One can reiterate the irony and confusion of the last few minutes of the France game and say that England might have held the result if Literally English players hadn't been substituted for imigrant players who went on to the pitch to play more immigrant than French players.
From the point of view of a Team and a Nation who will undoubtredly win many neutral verdicts as having been cheated of the outcome of the quarter final v Portugal as the result of the disallowed goal late in the 90 mminutes I feel that if questions have to be asked it is about the relationship between the Manger and the Captain regarding the kind of hype that we have been getting in the media. Of course the nation likes to have a diversion from it's woes and young sporting heroes to admire instead of serious issues which betray the Prime Minister's ineptitude but I'm personally quite tired of seeing what I feel is a certain amount of cowardice on the part of the Manager with regard to the personality cults which tend to get built up around key players with regard to the management of publicity. There will be those who say rightly of course that it's just a game and we shouldn't take it so seriously: I personally feel that when you see diabolical decisions like Sol Campbell's fictitiously disallowed goal that it can't be taken seriously at all but that's another matter.
Questions will also be raised about Beckham's fitness for the Captaincy as a result of his penalty bogey. It certainly is difficult to see that the suggestion he is under too much pressure in the Job can be particularly easily dismissed. To a certain extent I feel that the Manager migt be more forceful with his Players and eg could have taken a tougher stance with Wayne Rooney of over the issue of his poor conduct which was rather submerged by the fact of him having scored an arguably fortunate goal in the France game and the media and politicians desperately wanting to find something else to talk about than the disinterest in local Democracy all too evident from the lack of voter participation in recent local Elections and the cost of the War in Iraq.
If anyone deserved any praise as the result of the French game I really felt in terms of good sportsmanship that the best model of a player on the pitch was the Frecnh Negro Player Makelele. Besides displaying excellent footballing skill in constantly wrong footing the English defence he was a was a model of courteousness and elegance and if Frace have won the verdict of fate, for my money it was because throughout the game he was constantly having to remonstrate with a hostile and aggressive Rooney who seemed more interested in playing British Bulldog than a game of Soccer. This was the real context of a final fifteen minutes of a game which Zinedine Zedane won with two perfect strikes on goal and in many ways I find it quite disturbing that the quality of debate on the tournament has arguably been so poor: alcohol fuelled xenophobic diatribes may sell a few Newspapers but it doesn't make a national squad function.
Seen by many as the 'breeding ground' of England Managers having sent both Alf Ramsey and Bobby Robson on to the England Job, the club is nonetheless very modest in size and has only just upgraded from a 22 to 30k seater stadium and has therefore had consistent trouble holding onto its' Stars over the years. Players such as Jason Dozzell, Mauricio Tarrico, Kieron Dyer and Richard Wright all departed for either Premiership status or better Premiership wages.
The phenomenal performance in the season 2000-1 was noted by many enthusing commentators, but what not many seemed to put their finger on was to my mind the real reason why Ipswich won more games away than at home and managed to finish ahead of many teams with a large multiplication of their revenue. I personally felt the explanation was relatively simple and consisted firstly of the fact that Ipswich were underrated by the opposition having spent some years out of the Premiership: a mistake which was not been repeated and saw Marcus Stewart the Town's diminutive top scorer attract rather more attention from big name defenders in 20001-2. The second principal reason which I felt had been overlooked by many was the overwhelmingly and unusually English or at least non Continental character of the team (I think only Charlton had more home grown players than Ipswich in 2002). So the team which won so many 'away' games was in reality much more 'at home' than the sides packed full of foreign stars which they were playing: no team had ever made Uefa Cup qualification in their first year after promotion.
It has been a fascinating time recently at the Club and the supporters, following on from the Towns dramatic 4th time lucky play off win against Bolton in 2000 (who had a ground almost 3 times the size), have had no shortage of drama and controversy. Everyone was saddened by the departure of Richard (Judas) Wright to Arsenal in 2000, which followed on the sale of Kieron Dyer to Newcastle two seasons before. Many perhaps rightly regarded the local man as the foundation of the success which led to the Town's involvement in the Uefa Cup that year. Once James Scowcroft had been sold to Leicester the Youthful Titus Bramble became the only home grown player getting regular first team games and the handful of replacements to the team that did so well were largely foreign. One doesn't wish to criticise the players' abilities on those grounds but aside from not speaking the language with any facility and taking time to adjust to the English game ; I can't help but wonder how much consideration George Burley (as a Scot) might haven given to this curious fact about the Britishness of the team whose form a side with new foreign stars was singularly failed to reproduce in terms of match results, the Town having had it's worst run of Premiership form ever, 16 league games without a win after a single victory in the first week of the season 2001-2.
There followed several serious injuries to key players including Marcus Stewart's broken jawbone which ruled the diminutive character out of the bruising encounter with Inter Milan's giant defenders which saw the Town edged out of the Uefa Cup by one of Europe's best and in form teams. People were saying as the Christmas period dawned that no club had ever occupied Ipswich's place (bottom) at such a stage in the season and evaded demotion but as Stewart himself said before the midwinter recovery which saw them win 4 from 5 and produce their biggest ever premiership victory 5-0 against fellow strugglers Leicester.

With regard to the state of Marcus' poor jawbone: now I realise all too well when it comes to witty informed conversation that I can be a hard act to follow, but a brief word of advice to all such well heeled rivals who have sold their souls to the media circus for any kind of attention on the Town's modest sized social circuit. You can't have everything and there's really no need to go kicking hell out of each other out of sheer jealousy and frustration at the inability to create anything as interesting and useful as my own erudite discourse. Now whilst I can well understand that people become depressed, violent even suicidal when they compare themselves to myself, this sort of thing isn't going to do the Town any good: now who knows what would have happened if little Marcus Stewart had managed to get up among Inter Milan's giant defenders ? So please be more careful with yourselves in future.
(To be read simultaneously in no less than five regional dialects).
I see Martijn Reuser the Town's Dutch international midfielder has caused a minor furore by saying that he and his girlfriend find the quality of cuisine in the local restuarants less than thoroughly pleasing. Well, I could hardly have less experience of eating at absolute best in anything more upmarket than a roadside cafe but I'm happy to take the criticism as a valid comment in general on the banality of local society: I'm sure we all owe Mr Reuser a modest debt of gratitude for finding the courage to speak honestly about the shortcomings of the pastoral Port in which we live and in noting this it is worth adding that acknowledging faults is the only realistic first step towrd remedying them.
March 19th 2002
Nice to see the expensive Italian Keeper Matteo Sereni back in the side after a month or two on the sidelines : whilst anyone can understand the sense in giving both Keepers match practice, Andy Marshall having moved from Norwich on the understanding that he would be getting first team games, it annoys me to see the Manager's job being the subject of mock voting in the local press. I see that Marshall was considered the fans choice (at least until he conceded six goals recently). The problem with this sort of thing is that people choose who they like not who is necessarily the better player, Sereni being married for example, makes him less popular with the ladies than the statuesque Marshall. I do think Sereni should have been recalled for the FA cup tie vs Man City when the Town were badly outplayed, but wish both Keepers indeed, obviously the whole squad well for the forthcoming relegation dogfight......
One wouldn't think that Town had as much going for them as they did judging from the apprehensive tone of some newspaper articles in 2002: it would hardly be possible to find the occasion of getting back into the Eufa Cup via the fair play league being greeted with as much unenthusiasm as it was. Whilst the Town remained on paper a reasonably good bet to bounce straight back up into the Premiership, at least according to the bookies, it does seem to suffer from some curious lack of faith in itself insofar as an awful lot of teams threatened by the financial crisis in the game would have given their eye teeth to be in George Burleys' shoes at that time.
This One supposes had to be put down to the length of time that Ipswich spent out of the Premiership, having invested in a rebuilt stadium and managed to get into Europe the first season after promotion it really wasn't foreseen that the same team would be demoted the following year. The failure of new foreign players to fit in to the setup had been identified by many as a reason for the drop and Finidi George the Nigerian athlete said that he had problems adjusting to the English game and understanding team tactics. I feel that there are at least several main factors that have conspired to this end however. Firstly as I 've said before, any team that routinely has to sell it's best domestic talent is going to be severely hamstrung competing in the top flight, that's simply inescapable and there's no way round it. Once it became apparent that the team was doing well in it's first year back at the top level, a much more cautious strategy could have been employed rather than the investment in the ground and squad acquisitions which many found disappointing. Too many of the local news reports of Town's progress had developed a triumphalist air, and pride as they say cometh before a fall. The necessity of waging a European campaign undoubtedly may have contributed to the off on off performance of the team in Premiership games but for my money the killer blow was the crucial injury to Striker Marcus Stewart just before the 2nd leg of the tie with Inter Milan which not only robbed the team of it's star scorer days before the season's most crucial game but left him effectively out of contention for the remainder of the season as Burley tried to plug the gap with additions like Marcus Bent from Blackburn.
January 2003
Well they say time and tide wait for no man, George Burley had been sacked! I must confess I'd perhaps rather have seen the back of David Sheepshanks (how can anyone take a bloke seriously with a name like that, oops sorry:) mine's bad enough), but there you go. It's still very difficult to fathom just what went wrong with the Town over the last 18 months (aside from the death of Jamie Cann MP and the fatuous attempt by the local paper to portray the event as anything other than a huge display of ludicrous incompetence) which hasn't really done anyone any good except his replacement. Burley has been blamed for bad transfer deals which may well be fairly true to say were inadvised, but aside from the fact that he, like every other citizen of the Town has had to endure the ghoulish spectacle of the Town's first citizen drinking himself to death and proudly growing a huge distended irreparable Liver whilst amongst other things reciting bland predictable lies about the drugs issue of the sort which led to the assassination of Veronica Guerin. It is unfortunately very difficult to portray the deceased as anything other than a debilitating influence on even the most minor and inconsequential of those with an interest in sport, health and the community and it is especially damning that this occurred whilst he was feigning to be competent to enquire into widely publicised and shambolic goings on at the local Hospital. There have been other tensions within the team which have been apparent before now. If you look at Ipswich's recent game against Forest you will note that they were demolished by two goals from David Johnson who, having topped the Town scoring charts in the season before Town were last promoted found that for whatever reason he wasn't scoring goals in the Premiership. Now many Town fans like myself will remember that he and the Northern Irish midfielder Jim Magilton had a bust up that season on the pitch and though the press made light of it this was a fairly serious event for players on the same team. Johnson's performance in the Forest game might tend to suggest that some bad blood betwixt himself (being obviously of principally negroid descent) and the conspicuously blonde Irishman (hailing as he does from a district quite well known for it's racist neo nazis) might have made a contribution to the curious ups and downs of the team's performance: it being the case that an influential midfielder can do these things to a striker's goal tally and general performance. The hypothesis is somewhat further strengthened by the observation that the hapless Finidi George (a Nigerian Olympic Gold Medallist) was having had distinct problem with his team play, or so it was being said at one point: for whatever reason he is presently free to depart on a 'gratis' transfer. This makes for a rather amusing contrast in characters at the Club recently insofar as Johnson was a bit of a 'Flash Harry,'if you care to put it that way, consistently sporting outrageous coloured hairdos, was also a bit of a talker who liked attention as opposed to Finidi George who seems to be the typical African, calm and even tempered, polite and humble to the point of the ridiculous.
I hope no-one will think it pedantic of me to mention this, One could easily make too much out of what had taken place no doubt, but in a Town rumoured to have the largest percentage of West Indians in the UK is arguably a fairly relevant and thought provoking set of circumstances; not least in respect of the fact that race relations in such a place do attract a fair bit of attention and any number of individuals could argue quite cogently in view of the obviously high rates of shall we say criminality among this 'diaspora' that they have been ruining everyone's social life for decades. This with regard to such things as the fact of such a huge influx of of those obviously preferring to vote for working class parties having contributed to a huge longstanding Labour majority on a Borough Council which might be said to have thereby partly isolated itself from the rest of the body politic. Which is unfortunately to a certain extent to have to say that many do find it tiresome that the social life of the town all too often consists of making allowances for the West Indian contingent who are unquestionably vocal, attention seeking, tending to monopolise the time, attention and resources of Publicans Courts and Constabulary. This isn't to say that there is nothing to be said for any sort of daring but to point out the West Indians locally do have a reputation for 'bad behaviour' which, regardless of anyone's opinions as to whether or not they are deserved have certainly in fact largely been earned, whatever the longer term perspectives or justifications for such a situation: for example their is not sufficient of an Asian minority to attract or create the same kind of disapprobation in Ipswich as there are in others (mostly northern urban centres) where there are conversely few West Indians. The quest for explanations as to the extraordinary rise and fall of ITFC is futher complicated by the fact that when Burley was casting about for solutions to the Club's free fall from the Premiership it was in fact a young black player of (presumably) West Indian extraction Marcus Bent whose arrival from Blackburn did, if only temporarily seem to stem the tide of failure.
Amidst such thoughts, with regard to the civic background of the Club it is perhaps also a not uninteresting fact that the team Captain Matt Holland was a fairly well liked International for the Irish Republic and apparently fairly comfortable in the Job of Town Captain. The new Manager Joe Royle would obviously perhaps do well to bear all these things in mind as the side pull back into the top half of the table with an eye on at least a play off place and the knockout phase wherein team morale and the ability to rise to the occasion will give his expensive looking parachute payment squad the opportunity to do their stuff and dispatch the opposition !
20/02/03 With regard to the fact of there having been a certain amount of controversy this week about the Club's financial position: I can only say that there is a certain logic at the moment in acknowledging these financial troubles and in saying let's get off the team's back insofar as it cannot be said that the change of Manager hasn't brought results or at least that Joe Royle has managed to effect some stability. It was the summoning of the Receivers which heralded the end of an eight match winning spell in league fixtures and the Town are still there or threabouts in terms of getting a crack at the all important play-offs. It's very pleasing to see both Reuser and McGreal of Town's Premiership veterans back in action against Grimsby though not both of them had the best of games.
09/05/04 Big sorry to all those who have been expecting me to keep this page up to date but the last couple of years have been very strange unpredictable and unpleasant for myself personally and so much has happened at the club over the last 12 months or so I hardly know where to start in framing some intelligible comment about the team and it's prospects of a play off place and promotion.
Those looking at the overall picture for Town will still have in mind the unfortunate spectre of the exodus of seasoned Town players like Holland and Hreidarsson and Bent which prospect became an unpleasant reality during the early part of the season when the team's overall form was sufficiently lamentable to have left them propping up the foot of the division and the extremely disturbed looking Town Captain Jim Magilton was threatening resignation and offering profound apologies to the local supporters. I won't say I haven't had any reservations about Magilton's captaincy and it is admittedly true that there were not many other serious options once Holland had departed but to his credit it has been extremely heartening to see for once that recently the Town have seemingly managed to find some strength of character and consistency in their play by winning six of seven games when a mid table finish at best looked on the cards and narrowly losing the one game to a last minute goal against high flying West Brom, a run of form which was only halted by guess who David Johnson, who celebrated his mended broken leg by bagging a pair in Forest's win over Town last Saturday which it is of course hoped will not be enough to edge Town out of the play off place that their recent hard graft has just about earned them. I am praying profoundly that we have seen the last of the curious boom and bust form that the team have evidenced in the last few years, that we are going to scrape the necessary points and put an end to the inconsistency of the team performance in that time as I am profoundly sick of watching the team win a load of games give everyone high expectations and then hey presto lose another lot which I am sure everyone who supports the team has found very strange and frustrating.
Best of Luck ChapsHaving sat and watched the play off defeat against West Ham the only thing that has stuck in my mind apart from the fact that I am unlikely to be taking out a Sky subscription next year was the fact that West Ham hardly needed to play at all and I might as well have switched off after five minutes because once Darren Bent had missed an open goal after two minutes the rest of the game was a boring and predictable formality was it not? I mean you can't afford to give opportunties like that away unless you wish to also exchange promotion hopes for a relegation threat. Perhaps his mind was on his latest vigilante attack which the local press have been making a nice meal out of, perhaps he was thinking about his girlfriend, perhaps the appearance of George Burley made him forget what he was doing. Whatever the truth may be, a lot of people will be asking about it in coming weeks as his mind was obviously elsewhere and it was rather an important occasion on which to have so obviously mislaid One's self possession and as I say, quite frankly I think Joe Royle will have every right to have some especially serious criticism to make of a man who for whatever reason seemed to have forgotten completely about football on the most important fixture played by the club in some thirty months. One might seek for the odd crumb of comfort and blame for example the referee who should have awarded Town a late second half penalty for the holding down of a Town player during a corner kick but the result was quite predictable after five minutes in that we were not the only tem hungry for promotion. The Club and the Town deserve better than these sort of 'prima donna' antics in that a bloke earning thousands of pounds a week should really be willing and able to concentrate on playing soccer if that is what he is supposed to be doing. It is a sad fact that Darren Bent will have no-one to blame but himself for the fact of playing first division football in the autumn and as fas as I'm concerned he may be a great young striker but if the team play doesn't improve he will be welcome to play elsewhere as far as I am concerned: that was a shocking schoolboy howler and I am very disturbed to see such evident lack of attention.