Town fan KARL FULLER gives his views on Town’s current plight – and a decade to forget
Shambolic!
It's the only word that sums up much of this decade as far as Ipswich Town are concerned.
I really feel sorry for those fans that have not experienced anything other than the last 10 horrendous years culminating in the last month of 2019. What really worries me now is that I see little sign of any shoots of recovery.
I feel so damn lucky to have caught the end of the 70s, being a fan of an FA Cup winning side, then the 80s brought the UEFA Cup and gave me time to watch the Boys of '81 and see the very latter stages of Sir Bobby's time as Town boss.
The 90s brought us the second division championship and life as inaugural members of the Premier League. The 00s started with a bang watching Town become the last club side to win at the old Wembley which rewarded us with a couple more years in the Premier League followed by a couple of years of European adventures and then along came the dark era of the teens.
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Those fans in their late teens or early 20s will know of nothing else and yet their unconditional love for a football club that has offered next to nothing back, matches all of ours but without any rewards to remember so fondly.
Two FA Cup wins, a play-off semi-final defeat to our nearest rivals and relegation to Division Three is what they'll remember for their efforts thus far. For a while this season, it looked like they might just have something to cheer - they still might. But worryingly, I am beginning to doubt it.
It was all looking too good to be true when we were grinding out wins from performances that were as bad in games as they were as good.
Then we hit what many thought was a blip.
But it was ok as we were second in the league and in a position we'd all have accepted at the start of the season - myself included I'll hasten to add. But while we can look back on the good times the past presented to most of us, it's always about the here and now with one eye on the future.
The current form is alarming.
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Bottom of the form table below even Bolton and Southend. Where has it all gone so badly wrong?
As I've said previously, it wasn't perfect to begin with, but at least it was a work in progress. We had an engine running that needed a bit of fine-tuning to have it purring perfectly. Instead, we blew a gasket, took the whole thing apart and now it would seem that our Chief Engineer Paul Lambert has ripped up the manual and has no idea as to how to place all the components at his disposal back together again. The engine has ceased altogether.
There are so many wrongs at this moment that I don't see how they can all be righted so quickly.
Hindsight is always a wonderful thing, but I was always worried about the affects of calling off games for international breaks when we really should have been able to cope with the squad at our disposal.
I've bored the pants off my thoughts on rotation and the net result over this festive period has seen a team (whoever has played) looked bereft of ideas, and with no cohesion in our play whatsoever.
Lambert's post-match comments after the Gillingham game did nothing to ease my worries about how we're going to get out of this rut, and I dread to think what message the players took from his words.
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Conceding five at Lincoln is completely unacceptable. A defence that for a while was the best in the division is as bad as it was at any time last season.
One consistent thought of mine throughout these mostly horrific 10 years is that so often, a lack of a transparent and realistic plan to move the club forward has been in place.
Now, the easy answer is to say time is up for Lambert. But if I've learnt one thing over the last decade, it's the problems at our once proud club run far deeper than whoever is the manager.
Happy New Year.
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