I have pasted the story below as you didnt link it Yorky Today, in fact since you took over or, to be generous, possibly, even before that, there has been one ingredient missing from the club and that is the word 'pride'. I have many very vivid memories. Among them Ted Phillips and his sidekick, Ray Crawford, being signed from Colchester United, who were then a Southern League team, and them both setting, what was then called, the First Division alight and Ted being described, in one of the national newspapers, as being 'Like a carthorse running down the field to score goals for fun'. Of George Burley as a young lad on his first appearance for the Town overlapping down the right wing with his hands flapping as he ran. Of Warky, the normal penalty taker, missing from the match so three penalties being missed on the day we stuck six goals past Manchester United. Of beating the mighty Barcelona 3-0. Of Kevin Beattie on the balcony of the Town Hall waving a placard which a supporter had thrust into his hands which read 'Kevin Beattie walks on water'. Of over 38,000 ardent fans cheering the Town on to stick five goals past Norwich and even more past the much fancied West Bromwich Albion. Oh the pride and the pride of the players in being allowed to play for Ipswich! That is what is missing pride, pride in the Town. Mr Evans, you have spent a great deal of money, most of it wasted. A pity, it has got us absolutely nowhere. 'Football is a funny old game', that is an old saying but a very true one. It is not like running any other type of business and you are not the first person to discover that. In our early days Captain Cobbold took advice from the chairman of Arsenal Football Club who had a great deal of football know-how and it paid dividends. Unfortunately, you took the opposite route and got rid of every single person at Ipswich Town who had, among them, a vast reservoir of football know-how. Again a pity. You appointed Mr. Clegg whose credentials were excellent but, unfortunately, his football knowledge was zilch! That was a major error of judgment and we are still paying for it. Any true Town supporter could have told you that appointing Roy Keane was a disaster waiting to happen and many people did try to tell you. The rest is history. Today we have Paul Jewell. He seems to be a very likeable chap and his football knowledge should allow him to turn into an excellent manager for Ipswich Town. Given time! Unfortunately Paul has not made a good start. His signing of all those 'old hands' with Premiership experience has been a disaster. What have they got to play for? They are no longer young and hungry, they do not care what colour shirt they pull on, why should they? They have a 'contract' and are paid (overpaid?) an enormous amount of money so, why worry? Most of them do a total disservice to the person who signed them. Mr Evans, I invite you to look, carefully, at our most successful times. In the beginning we did it with a lot of hard working players but with the addition of two people brought in from the Southern League, into what is now called the Premiership. I ask you! During Bobby Robson's era we twice won the FA Youth Cup and those players went on to become the backbone of a team which was voted as the best team in Europe (which of course meant the best team in the whole world of football), with the addition of, initially, Paul Mariner who came from lowly Plymouth Argyle for £200,000 (remember Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest spent £1m on a far less able striker) and later, of course, by the two Dutchmen who cost, if I remember correctly, £100,000 and £120,000 respectively. That is what a manager and supporting team with footballing know-how can achieve for you, but the basics have to be right. Here at Town, right now, they are completely wrong. Six years ago (time flies) we again won the FA Youth Cup and where are those players now, right now, there is not one of them on our teamsheet, why not? That is where our problems lie. During that time we had an excellent young Irish keeper, Shane Supple was his name. He suddenly gave it all up and went home to play Gaelic football, for fun. One of his reasons for giving up a very promising career was that when he eventually got into the first team, to his horror, he found out that some of his colleagues did not care if they won or lost! That is why I am not sure when the rot set in here at Ipswich Town. Now I would advise that you Google this young man and read some of the things he has recently been saying, it may pay you to and he has, recently, been saying quite a lot! That is where we need to start. Mr Evans, if I may presume to advise you, this is what I would do. Firstly I would look carefully round the footballing world and bring in an experienced chief executive from the best run football club I could find outside the Premiership. Next, I would have that person and Paul Jewell in and sit down with them and prepare a programme to run over a minimum of three years. Firstly, I would propose a Category One Academy (it will pay for itself many times over in the long run) and I would put Bryan Klug in charge of it. Next I would look at the existing team sheet and get rid of all players with the following exceptions: Richard Wright, Arran Lee-Barratt, Aaron Cresswell, Carlos Edwards, Keith Andrews (I would make him club captain, he cares, OK he was playing for his future when he came here but now give him something else to play for – The Town), plus Jason Scotland and Danny Collins, if I could keep him, and any other fringe players who have come through the Academy. I would entice Jordan Rhodes to come back home and build the team to feed him, and bring his father back in in his former role as well. I would then look carefully at all the maturing Academy players and those who are in the process of leaving plus those who have recently been allowed to leave and, those I wanted, I would offer each of them a minimum of a two-year contract and make them want to prove themselves and want to play for the club they obviously love. That is important and, for them, first team football is equally important. In the beginning we would have sufficient 'old heads' to steady the youngsters and I am certain in year one we would, at least, hold our own but after that and, providing we enrol some real 'scouts' to bring in the occasional quality player to fill a niche, I am certain we would then be back to where we used to expect to be and then the stadium extension which Mr Clegg was speaking of would become a necessity and you would be able to recoup the many millions club debt which is owed to you. Happy days. As a point of interest I was recently reading that Athletic Club Bilbao only recruit from their Academy and only people local to them can enter their Academy. Food for thought there. I wish you well. An Ipswich supporter who really cares.
This article has been posted on TWTD since before christmas. I like TWTD because it does give voice to many wide ranging opinions at times and there are a few thoughtful blogs that do cut to the heart of the problems that Town face at the moment.
it has some good points but also some mad ones. He wants Brian Klug to head our academy but I would ask why he would leave Spurs for us? He doesnt like the fact that none of our youth cup winning team are still here but are any of them anywhere? Keeping Edwards???? and he wants us to be run like we were in the 70's - so do I in some ways but football has changed a great deal from back then. Players regularly jumped up from divisions 3 or 4 to the top but it is a very rare occurance these days. I think we all agree with the sentiment in the article. If you asked millions of football fans I think 95% of them would say they wanted to succeed with a team made up of their own youngsters. The other 5% are those that love what the likes of Man City do but I really think they are in the minority. Buying from the lower leagues is also a nice idea and it can be done, although not as easily as it was 20 years back but can anyone think of 4 or 5 players that could slot into our first team that are currently in league 1 or 2? Most of the promising youngsters are snapped up by the big boys in their early teens so really we are hunting for late developers or a few players that have slipped through the net. It really is a difficult one to judge. On 1 hand a lot of fans would like Rhodes back but for the past 3 years these same fans have been going crazy over the possibility of signing Chopra. We now have him and yet are still not happy. Personally I cant see Chopra and Rhodes working together so are we going to write Chopra of after 6 months? The biggest problem is all clubs seem to expect instant success these days. Building for the future and giving a player or manager a year to settle in is unlikely to ever happen again
Tractorbhoy I have always known you to be the voice of reason to my sometimes hot headed approach but even you must be bloody annoyed at what is going on at our beloved club! This will be our TENTH season in the Championship and we are further away from achieving promotion now than we ever have been. This is despite the fact that we were taken over by a rich benefactor. For all the good that Evans has done he has thrown the baby out with the bath water! We all know as supporters of Town that we have never been good when spending cash! The whole ethos of our football club has changed beyond all recognition, just take the ticket pricing policy as just one example! £30 to sit and watch garbage football is no way to encourage our missing fanbase back to Portman Road! We have badly lost our way over the last few years and no one seems to have a clue about how to arrest our stagnation! The word Stagnation best sums us up! Gentle decline al la Coventry, The Sheffield Clubs etc.
The general feeling from the article is spot on but some of his advice to ME towards the end is a bit deluded. The majority of premiership clubs and other big european teams have such vast scouting networks that it makes it impossible to pick up an Arnold Muhren or Ted Phillips for a small fee. I believe given time PJ will get it right and we will have our club back, with players who have pride for the shirt but it's not an overnight change.
JWM, I am not overly happy but you cant change things instantly and i try to think of what is achievable and whether the club will do this rather than going into a fantasy realm and then getting annoyed when it doesnt happen. These days I can name only 2 or 3 players in the 1st team squad I actually like whereas in years gone by it was only 1 or 2 I wasnt overly keen on. If I let this view get in my way I would call for a whole new team in January but I know it isnt going to happen so I dont bother shouting. I think our revolving door policy has to stop if not we are forever going to be going around in circles searching for a magic formula. It will mean I have to see a lot of faces in the next 12-18 months that I dont really want to but I think its better than the sledgehammer approach used by Keane. I would love us to put energy and commitment into our youth team (achievable) but poaching Spurs head of youth development is crazy therefore I am not going to say we need to get Klug and then get annoyed when it doesnt happen Our fans moan that we dont play our youth but then also moan when we dont spend the £8m from the CW sale to buy more stars. I dont like the way this club has been run since MEs take over but that is mainly down to this clamber for instant success. I may think 99% of the money has been wasted but I get really annoyed when fans say that ME hasnt financially supported us. We are losing an unsustainable £10m a year in round figures. Our wage bill is 99% of our income. If your or my place of work had that kind of set up we would be looking for new jobs in the very near future but it still isnt good enough for some. The thing is we mainly asked for the old days but I think we are as close to it as we are ever going to get. Jewell seems to me to be a typical Town appointment in a similar mould to Royle and Burley. He has made the odd big signing (Chopra) and mixed it with lower league talent (Cresswell and Drury) and younger players with higher expectations (JET) I would like us to have a few more young town players in the squad and Hyams constant omissions baffle me but having said that, now Bowyer is playing central then I can say its harder to call. I am hoping that Jewell looks to bring in a new generation in the next 12 months and if there is no sign of this then I may start to have bigger doubts but I wasnt expecting instant success and although our 7 match run was hard to take I did actually think alot of the defeat were down to individual stupidity rather than a bigger problem. We had very poor performances during that period but we were unlucky not to pick up points aswell. The clubs non footballing aspects and ticketing prices I do find bizarre but I trust that our marketing team have done research and come up with a pricing structure that will both attract a fair crowd and make the club a decent return. The moment I can no longer see progress will be the time I get angry or disillusioned but I take progress over 3 months or compared to this time last year and not on a game by game basis. I can tell you 100% that I am happier now than I was 12 months ago and I would imagine that you are to. You may wish we had moved on further but I cant believe you would prefere our situation back then to our one now.
Again I have to agree with the sentiment of this article but it has some pretty unrealistic points. The way I see it is that ME has been largely naive, but has not made many poor decisions apart from one and that was the appointment of Keane. We weren't doing that great when Jim was in charge but we were in a strong position if we could get the right management in. What proceeded was an absolute disaster and if there is any time as a town fan I would like to delete from my memory it would be that of Keanes tenure what I would give to go back in time to when Jim was sacked and appoint a different manager with a team which included McAuley, Wright, Rhodes, Garvan and Walters with Klug working in the academy. That complete and utter shambles has left us in a complete mess, probably leading to some understandable rash decision making over the past 12 months and some short term signings. After 2 years of absolute dross these was never going to change over night, Keane put us in such a bad state to think we would be up there challenging for promotion this season was IMO optimistic. I think it would be naive to think that Jewell could suddenly create a team of youngsters and lower league signings over night, that would take very good management indeed. It seems that the frustrations of Keanes tenure are starting spill over, when they perhaps were not shown when he was actually here, we need to give Jewell some patience, and that extends beyond january. I am expecting alot of dissapointment in this up and coming January transfer window tbh, I don't think we will sign many players we require as this transfer window is not the time to build a squad, we will certainly have to wait untill the summer when hopefully we will have a clearer direction of where we are going. This is going to be a slow process, I still think next season will be one where we evolve as a team and will not neccessarily be challenging at the top of the league. I think ME has realised some of his mistakes and his naivity and is now being more cautious but these changes take time to show effect, especially as a severe amount of damage had already been done. And once again tractorbhoy I am trying to sum up how I feel but cannot do it any better than you've done in your last post, 100% spot on.
you can talk all you like its action we wont not words who will put there money where there mouth is ???????????????????????
