Following today’s woeful performance by my beloved Ipswich Town against Nottingham Forest, I sit and write this with perhaps the biggest conundrum in my 33 years as a Town fan and that is in respect of our Manager Paul Jewell. Do I think we should sack him or back him?
Reading around the various social network sites and forums this evening, trying to digest the moods of many wonderful Town supporters, it is very difficult to know whether the majority are hoping for the metaphorical axe to fall on Jewell’s head, or wished for it to be kept a cut-above – for the time being.
Today’s game mirrored what has been witnessed before in the last few weeks at a very charitable Portman Road these days. The same script pretty much written on each occasion, but the guise of the visiting team dressed in different colours and presented under a different name.
No disrespect meant, but Doncaster, Reading (that’s top five Reading), Watford and now Nottingham Forest have all visited the Road and all looked poor outfits on the day, but each have left with the full three points on offer. The common theme here is that on each occasion, Town have looked marginally poorer!
Any number of words can be used to describe these four home defeats. But the most disappointing of words that can only sum up today is ‘predictable’.
I had a Forest fan contact me on Twitter yesterday wishing me a Happy New Year – after today, and I told him not to worry about the poor run his side were on with no goals since….well, since putting three past Ipswich some eight games ago. I told him how charitable we would be as proved that last time our two sides met and sure enough, Forest only had to wait around five minutes to score their first goal in forever (I’m sure that’s how it probably felt to their fans).
The fact they went on to score three goals for only the second time this season (both times against Town) was largely down to us I have to say rather than through their own efforts. But ultimately, you can’t say they didn’t deserve their win if only for the fact they defended better than us when needed to.
And when you saw the spine of our side containing Lee-Barrett, Delaney, Ingimarsson, Leadbitter and JET compared to say the one in our last home game that saw a victory against Derby which contained Lee-Barrett, Sonko, Collins, Andrews, Chopra and Scotland, you could forsee a sinking ship even before it set sail at 3.00pm.
Although to be fair, JET had one of his best games at Portman Road thus far this season, should we really have been going up against a struggling Forest side with just the one up top and one who has scored just two goals all season? And no disrespect to Andy Drury, but why? What must Josh Carson have been thinking about what he has to do to get a start? Is it too much to ask to play with two out and out wingers at home in Carson and Lee Martin?
It makes you feel even more for Colin Healy who was substituted after twenty-odd minutes against Doncaster when Town were 2-0 down and yet today, all eleven were deemed good enough to continue after yet another sluggish start.
And so back to the debate that has filled our topics of conversation this evening. Do we sack or back Jewell? The only small dose of positivity that I can come up with tonight is that my gut feeling is to stick with him until the end of the season. I do not want us to be a sacking club and I feel that just twenty-four games at Portman Road in his one-year tenure so far is not quite enough.
However, what is enough are the twelve defeats and conceding of forty-three goals in those twenty-four games and more importantly, the unacceptable performances. It’s not like it’s the odd game here or there is it? I haven’t even mentioned the home game against Norwich last year or away at Swansea or Leicester and the 7-0 drubbing at Peterborough this term. But all these games thrown into the mix does not make a happy cocktail of results or performances and they need to stop now!
I am very worried about the next four months and fear a relegation battle. Our over reliance on loan players is back-firing, we have leaned too heavily towards experience over-looking the need to inject youth and pace into the side and where is the next home-grown regular starter coming from?
Roy Keane is so often criticised for letting Jordan Rhodes go, but like Connor Wickham, Rhodes would have left eventually if his career had of developed at Ipswich as it has at Huddersfield. For me, Keane’s big mistake was getting rid of Bryan Klug.
So I hear the reasons why many want Jewell out and also the questioning of Simon Clegg’s role at the club – one can be swayed either way on the ‘sack him or back him’ debate. For now, this is Jewell’s team and his way of trying to sort out the mess that Keane made of his time here, whether Jewell’s way will succeed, only time will tell. Its how much time Marcus Evans will allow that is the underlying factor of the whole debate.
