As more consistent teams such as Crystal Palace begin to usurp Town's position at the fag end of the play-off positions, it's beginning to look as though the promotion place that most Town fans (and investors) aspire to is beginning to look more and more like wishful thinking. But as mid-table mediocrity beckons again, how realistic is it to expect Town to compete in or even reach the Premiership nowadays?
With QPR suddenly becoming the richest club in the world and Derby in line to scoop £31 million for the most abject season since , erm, well since Town were in the same position - an uncomfortable question has to be asked. Is Town's current position now about as far as they can go?
There are changes afoot in football - and most of them are to Town's considerable disadvantage. Town are not unique in this particular cleft stick. Greed and self interest, coupled with a supine, incompetent FA make the current Premier League quite literally a closed shop. That shop is really only open to teams prepared to waste all there income and more besides on paying overinflated wages to distinctly average footballers.
And even if you are in that closed shop, it's not enough - because everyone seems to forget that only one team can win it (although conveniently 2nd, 3rd and 4th will do just as well, thank you very much) if you can hop on to the gravy train of the 'Champion's League'. As this overbloated competition is invariably won by a club coming a distant 4th in its domestic league. It could be more realistically named the runners up by a long way league.
The disease that is rife in the Premiership was beautifully illustrated last week when that likeable, paragon of virtue, Sam Allardyce, made the headlines for swiftly grabbing his ill-deserved multi-million pound pay off with both hands. He was not, it seems, up to managing a 'big club' like Newcastle. Although Allardyce's fate was extreme, even by Newcastle's standards, it was generally agreed 20 odd games and £25 million wasted in 6 months is no time to judge a manager. Even if he is an arrogant oaf.
And the hacks do have a point to a certain extent. But the truly ludicrous basis of Big Sam's sudden departure is the daft notion that Newcastle are a 'big club'. You and I know this is absolute tosh. They are one of the smallest clubs I can think of. Unless you are a pensioner, you won't remember Newcastle winning a domestic trophy. And you'll need a pretty long memory to even remember them winning the Inter Cities Fairs Cup European back in the late 60's.
That's a pretty abysmal record - feeble in comparison not just to Ipswich Town, but also, lest we forget, Norwich City and Luton Town. And that's just looking at small provincial towns and cities in East Anglia. There are dozens and dozens of bigger clubs than Newcastle who are by any stretch of the imagination, small beer - and have been for 50 years. 'Big' presumably means they just happen to squander money on an epic scale, year after year and rotate hapless managers. This is after all, the same club that sacked Sir Bobby Robson for 'only' qualifying for the UEFA Cup - and replacing him with Graham Souness!
There are many other clubs labouring under the delusion of 'bigness'. Spurs spring readily to mind. Back in the days when clubs tried in the FA Cup, Spurs were proud of their record as a 'Cup Team' and indeed these City Slickers did seem to rouse themselves and win the cup on a regular basis, especially if the year had a '1' at the end of it. But my, how things change. Nobody cares about the Cup any more, not even Spurs. And the sad fact is Town have won the top division more recently than Spurs. They too are about as far removed from a big club as you can get.
I could go on - but I better get round to the point of this article. Are we Town fans equally deluded with bigness and think of our club as rightfully belonging in a higher league than the one we are currently treading water in? Is it now just a tad ridiculous to expect Ipswich Town to compete in the Premier League on the basis of past glories, rather than current inadequacies? Yes we did flourish in the top division for well over a decade. But that was over 25 years ago! When we dropped out of the top division in the early 80's, only Manchester United, Arsenal, Everton and erm... Coventry City had been in the top division longer. A proud record indeed. Small wonder perhaps that we tend to think of ourselves as bigger than we really are.
Now sadly, things are a little different. Since Sheepshanks emerged to bask in the spotlight whilst simultaneous destroying our reputation and finances, Town have hardly figured in the top division at all. Two years out of twelve (and counting) so far. That is hardly a yo-yo club - that's a second division club. We are where we are on merit (or lack of it).
Only things may now be even worse. Since we sold out as an investment opportunity to an offshore company of unknown value, we no longer know exactly how competitive we can be in this league, let alone the top division. At present, the omens don't look good. Ipswich is a small provincial market town with a strictly limited fan base. Our youth system can no longer generate many young players that other teams want to buy, nor can we hang on to the good ones we want to keep. Worse still, we often seem to find it very difficult to accommodate our home-grown players in our own team.
I for one don't think Town are very big at all. And I think there is a very easy test of bigness for deluded Town fans to take. Imagine Town in a tug of war for a player who has to choose between us, and say Watford, Crystal Palace or even for the sake of topicality, Plymouth. We'd be 4th choice - and rightly so.
Town are not really very big at all in today's football market where genuine and more visible investors are using their surplus cash to play with their new toys. All we really have is hopes and memories and an invisible investor which makes us almost as much of a laughing stock as our inadequate chairman.
The unpalatable truth is that there are plenty of clubs in this division with more tangible assets and more visible backers than this one. There are no short cuts to success. We can't buy success because we don't have much (if any) money. We can't build success because we'll lose players to bigger clubs. We can't sustain success because we're not a football club any more, nor even a millionaire's toy. Rather worryingly we're an investment - in an industry that traditionally tosses away money as though it is contaminated with bubonic plague.
Even more worryingly, we can't even guarantee staying solvent because those heart-stopping rumours about Lauren Robert show the lunatics that somehow are still in charge of the asylum are still insane and itching to ruin us all over again. So pardon me if I am less than enthusiastic about the current circus at Portman Road.
My expectations may not be great, but my hopes are. I hope Ipswich to build a solid base from the excellent players already on the books. It's worked before and it will again. To my mind, that's the one positive about Town's disastrous fire sale. Because our new owners do not have much money on the one hand - and expect to make some on the other, they will presumably be very tight with the purse strings - and apply just a modicum of common sense to an aspiring football club in a small market town. And to my mind, common sense is all it takes. But in football, that's probably too great an expectation.
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