The View From Churchmans

A dismal end to the season for home fans. We'd wondered during the second half if there'd be anyone left for the players' lap of appreciation after the game, but with five minutes to go, it looked like there might not be anyone left even to see the end of the match! There really was an impressive exodus from all four stands, and this performance didn't deserve anything ... More...

They always do this to us, don't they? Whenever a season comes to a premature end, with mid-table mediocrity the only feasible outcome, we turn up expecting to see the manager start working on what he's hoping to start next season with ...and always end up disappointed. It's fair to say that the vast majority of the home supporters would have liked to have seen players such as ... More...

No surprise to see the net bulge a few times in this match - Paul Jewell said something afterwards about it featuring "two of the most attacking sides in the division", but of course we all know the real cause was that the match featured two of the worst defences in the division. Truth be told, it was an uninspired performance from Town, and hardly the highest quality ... More...

There was a time in the recent past when Ipswich couldn't manage a three-goal victory margin at Portman Road for love nor money, but that's three in a row now, and this was the most comfortable of them all. Bristol City were one of the poorest sides to have visited this season (although their effort and commitment was decent enough) but there's been no guarantee Town would take ... More...

A really satisfying victory. The score might have flattered Town in terms of the relative quality of the teams, but it was deserved in terms of sheer effort. And in the context of what's been happening so far this season, perhaps even more satisfying than the first four-win sequence in the league for over 7 years was the first appearance of back-to-back clean sheets since September. Just as ... More...

I'm sure every Town fan is still looking at that score in disbelief. It would have been a tremendous result in any season, but in this one? I know that Town's goalscoring record is much better than the league position suggests, but five? Against the supposedly tightest defence in the division? Where did that suddenly come from? It certainly wasn't from any radical departure in personnel or tactics. Jewell ... More...

The cynics in the crowd were remarking at half time that this wasn't going to plan for Paul Jewell at all - he'd finally conceded to what the fans had been asking for all season, with young players through the heart of the team, and surely Town were supposed to be on the wrong end of a thumping by now, to prove he'd been right to stick with ... More...

I'm not sure when - or if - Town have previously lost five out of six home matches, but I can't even find the motivation to look it up at the moment. Perhaps the most damning statistic, however, is that in their last 10 matches, Forest have failed to score an astonishing 8 times ...but in the other 2 games, they've scored 3 goals - both times against ... More...

So... was that amazing 40 minutes at Oakwell a flash in the pan or yet another turning point in Town's season? That's what the home support came to find out, and the answer was, well, uncertain. This was quite simply two poor, unadventurous sides playing out a poor, unadventurous match, and either could have scraped a victory, although a goalless draw might have been an appropriate result. For ... More...

Town became just the eighth team in the last decade to lose seven league games in a row in the Championship, and no team has had a run like that and avoided the drop since Stoke and Bradford in 2002-03. For those who say a season in League One might not do the club any harm, I should point out that the last four to lose seven in ... More...

I'm not one of those people who think that anyone in the crowd can possibly call things better than the manager, with his intimate knowledge of the team and (I hope) opponents, as well as his experience of managing. But when 17,000 people can see that a decision he's about to make is the wrong one, well, you have to believe in the Wisdom of Crowds theory. If ... More...

The score most certainly doesn't tell the tale here. Town were utterly awful in the first half and merely mediocre in the second, and were comprehensively beaten ...by the bottom team in the table. Before this season, in the last 45 years, Portman Road had only seen the home side three goals down at half-time on three occasions in this division. Now we've had not one, but *two* ... More...

A continuation of everything which was wrong on Tuesday night, but this time against a more challenging side and with the almost inevitable result. Palace had the best record of any visiting side at Portman Road over the past decade even before this match, and now they've probably been moved up in to the "bogey team" category here. Town seemed uninspired, and just couldn't put a sustained period ... More...

This won't be the most exciting of reports, as it wasn't the most noteworthy of games. Town only really got going for a brief period in the second half, and for the rest of the game Portsmouth looked the more likely to produce something ...but it sums up the match if you consider that even so, they only troubled Stockdale a couple of times. I think the danger inherent ... More...

A fascinating match, and probably one of the best seen at Portman Road in the last few years. Two teams on form, and trying hard to play very different styles of football - Town a fast, progressive passing game, and Brighton a rather strange, unhurried, no risks approach which concentrated on not giving the ball away at any cost, even if it meant bringing the match to a ... More...