We’re all going to Ipswich. It’s a long way.
There’s a definite early eighties feel to this week’s festivities. Wednesday night looms on the horizon but before then there’s the small matter of a trip to Ipswich, who for a brief but glorious time were our rivals. If it was happening now it’s be called the M6/A14 derby, or the David Geddis derby, or the Christ Hasn’t Alan Brazil Got Over It Yet Event or something equally trite. Instead of that here we are with the Sunday two o’clock support act before the Proper Clubs kick off, and why we have to play on a Sunday when we’ve got the Champions eague midweek is a mystery known only to Sky.
After we went our seperate ways Ipswich bounced around the top two divisions for thirty-odd years before getting fed up of all that bouncing so they appointed PauL Lambert as manager. Unsurprisingly they ended up in the third. Then they got one of those analytics specialists in to do some big sums and got two promotions.
Apart from that they also had Dalian Atkinson for a while and the derby they have got is the most ludicrous in the country, where two clubs forty miles apart pretend to hate each other with an all-consuming passion. If they stay up their manager will be the new Next Big Thing and be linked with every job with every mid-table club with aspirations to get into the Uefa Conference League, which as we all now know is a pointless waste of time
There might be some squad rotation for this one, but wih Unai he’ll probably pick a full-strength team and have them playing a friendly on Monday. John McGinn’s out, which means one less of what the press would call a selection headache and a couple of our long-termers are inching their way back to the bench. Get a few early goals and let some of the team have the rest of the match off ready for Wednesday.
