Town fan Karl Fuller looks at another game where Town fail to score and why there are four steps Ipswich need to take
Another game without a goal on Saturday at Birmingham – don’t tell the ‘numbskulls’, but that’s four games now without a goal.
I’m sure those expert pundits out there who keep telling us long-suffering fans ‘to be careful what we wish for’, will dress it up another way.
I have wished for far more to write about over the past few months rather than recycling the same words to express the feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction as another depressing Saturday afternoon has passed us by.
650 words on matters over the past week is now not anywhere enough – where do I start?
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Following on from my open letter that appeared in the last column where I finished with: “We’ve put up with mediocre football for too long now. While we acknowledge we have no divine right to anything at all, we do deserve more from the leadership both on and off the pitch. It is time to deliver!” Deliverance is now finding its way.
We started last week with news of a 10% price cut on season tickets for 2018/19.
It’s a good gesture but no more than that.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful but while prices should never have gone up this season on the back of our worst season for 58 years, pricing was not really the burning issue.
Nevertheless, it is the first step of four in my mind that needed to be made.
The second step in this whole process came with the news that Mick will be leaving at the end of the season.
Change simply needed to happen.
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I’m happy to go on record and say that Mick was excellent for us in his first three years.
But the second half of his reign has just got more unbearable as time has gone on.
The experts with their hollow warnings wouldn’t be saying what they are if they had paid out of their own pockets to watch us for just two games recently, let alone the last two seasons.
In Mick’s time, we never won an FA Cup match, we never beat Norwich, we have worried more about matching up to the opposition rather than giving them something to think about and we have not scored a single goal in our last five home games.
These are just four things that we can seemingly only dream of these days.
So I’m sorry for wishing for more but for fans of any club, these are not unrealistic expectations over a course of so many years.
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The third step of the process that Evans needs to enforce is picking the right man for the next job.
That is easier said than done of course.
Does he continue with his usual stance of going down the tried and tested route or gamble on an upcoming younger manager cutting his teeth in the lower level of the game?
We’ve gone nowhere with the former option, why not give the latter idea a try?
The experts could be right ultimately, we could be even worse and God forbid, get relegated to League One.
But don’t we deserve to find out in the hope that things might just get better?
To complete the process of change, Evans needs to loosen the purse strings. The Championship is a larger financial beast now from the one he first went into battle with.
To have any hope of progress, it cannot be completely gambling on loans, freebies and minimal outlay.
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This is the one step that worries me simply because if he is going to loosen the strings, then surely he could have done that two years ago with Mick?
The last week has set a platform for a very interesting few weeks off the pitch.
Meanwhile, on the field of play, these last seven games are going to be pure torture.
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