- Sixteen-year unbeaten streak ended, but suffocating pressure finally lifted.
- City return as a different beast under the leadership of Philippe Clement.
- With promotion at stake, Town have everything to lose tomorrow afternoon.
Not going to lie. I don’t enjoy them. In fact, during that 16-year run that we so wallowed in, I dreaded them.
We were in that little-to-gain, everything-to-lose hinterland, and I didn’t like it. The stress and anxiety would start in the week leading up to the game and not subside at any point until the referee’s final whistle.
But, oddly, that miserable, listless defeat in November released the pressure valve. As angry as I was in its painful aftermath, it also felt as if a weight had been lifted. Because it had.
No longer were we dreading defeat and the ensuing round of gloating and bravado.
“We’re gonna beat you lot cos you’re sh*t.”
Well, yes, you did, and, yes, we are.
Or rather, we were.
Bragging rights back on the line…
The Norwich City that Ipswich Town face tomorrow is a very different beast from that broken, half-hearted, shambles of a team in November, even though as many as eight of those who started at Portman Road could start tomorrow.
Make it make sense.
And the coin has been flipped. Given our respective trajectories, it is Ipswich who find themselves in that uncomfortable place: little to gain, everything to lose.
Okay, so ‘little to gain’ is a bit of a stretch – they have the small matter of an automatic promotion chase to play for – but they certainly have everything to lose.
Okay, so ‘everything’ is a bit of a stretch, but a City win would certainly throw a spanner in their automatic promotion works.
And from a Norwich hue, the opposite is true. If we lose, of course, we’ll all be a bit peed off and braced to endure more days, weeks and months of Suffolk bravado and bragging, but that’s it.
We’re not expected to win. Ipswich fans seem, on the whole, pretty confident they’re going to double us this season, and it’ll make little difference to our relegation fight/promotion push, as neither is a thing.
While local derbies are never a ‘free hit’, as the saying goes, for City, this is about as close as you get. And the uninhibition of being in that place sometimes works, as it did at The Den a week ago.
That’s not to say I expect us to win tomorrow. Whether we care to admit it or not, Ipswich are a good side and have many quality players, as you’d expect given the sums spent.
In Jack Clarke and Azor Matusiwa, they have two of the best players in the Championship, and the options Kieran McKenna has on his bench every week are of an ilk that every other head coach in the division can only dream of.
The Clement factor
Ipswich should get promoted automatically and, in (reluctant) fairness to them, it looks as if they probably will.
Yet, given the place Philippe Clement has led us to, it’s a game we could win; are capable of winning. And that’s not something I ever believed of the team that lined up at Portman Road in November.
Ipswich fans will, of course, disagree with me, but I see it as a 50/50 game (maybe 60/40 in Town’s favour) that could go either way and will probably hang on something daft, like a piece of brilliance or a stinker of a refereeing decision.
That’s the best I have, I’m afraid. A draw, perhaps. We’ll see.
And not a single mention of that Chilean Del Boy tribute.
Quite proud of myself.
OTBC.
