The View From Churchmans

Normally I just sit down and write these things, but I've been pondering the whole way home just how I'm going to put into words what I've just seen, and I don't think I can do it justice. It's easy to glibly say "the worst this " or "the best that", but I cannot recall, in over thirty years of watching the Town, a less committed performance from such a disinterested group ... More...

Three goals against Pompey to add to the three each against Reading, Sheffield United and Forest, and two against Wolves at Portman Road this season (not to mention the six against Leicester). Amazing how in comparison, the best we've managed against any of the bottom five has been an odd-goal victory. Expect to see the clich More...

When you get to as few away games as my parental responsibilities restrict me to nowadays, you want them to be memorable, and at a quarter to four this afternoon, today looked like it was only going to be memorable as the one where our play-offs hope finally died. For 45 minutes we had been awful, with not a single redeeming performance amongst the eleven shirts. In the tea bar the conversations tended ... More...

So with results elsewhere, the playoff places opened up for us like an Ipswich defence ...and we blew it big-time, like a scuffed Counago shot. The curse of Manager of the Month meant we were always going to be up against it, but to throw away a decent position twice is desperately disappointing. Sure, it was a really exciting afternoon, but we weren't a side showing enough maturity or composure for the playoffs, ... More...

A third home draw against a bottom-of-the-table club in four weeks, and I guess it's bye-bye to the playoffs now, if only because all four clubs above us are playing so well. I guess the most surprising thing about this scoreline was how few of us predicted it beforehand. In retrospect, what on earth possessed us to even think we might beat Brighton? What is it about our team which results in them being ... More...

The "simply not good enough" of the last home game seems a lot longer than ten days ago now. Given that Leicester went mad at Portman Road and we've yet to see Pompey, it perhaps wasn't surprising that Reading - the third-placed side - were just about the classiest opponents we've seen here this season. It's no fluke they're where they are: their movement was excellent, their speed often unanswerable, and even with ... More...

Twenty minutes gone, Hermann collapses like he's been shot after an innocuous-looking tangle with a defender, he's pounding the turf with his hands in absolute agony, the physio's administering gas and air, Mrs R next to me is being reminded of childbirth, and quite frankly I'd rather have been anywhere else than watching this distressing scene. The impact of the rest of the afternoon wasn't much different, it was just in a slower, more ... More...

If you thought the future of the club hangs on the results between now and May, think again. At the Fans Forum just a couple of hours before the match, the Chief Executive suggested that it actually hangs on the next half-dozen games (see separate report for the reason why), and for me at least, that was a frightening revelation. If we do badly in the next few matches, we may actually not ... More...

I've had several people in the past suggest I'm a bit mean with my ratings, and sometimes a bit doom-and-gloomy with my writeups, so this one might surprise a few people. Along with everyone around me, including a friend who's a Wolves season-ticket holder who'd come along, I genuinely thought we were tremendous in the first half (although admittedly poor in the second). So I was stunned after the match when I met ... More...

Wow. You get something truly memorable once or twice a season, and it's the reason why you keep coming back even when things are bad. Today was one of those events. Dale Roberts would have been very, very proud. The first half, to be honest, was a good hard scrap, and although we played our part, the main chances fell to Sheffield and we only had one real effort, Darren B's one-on-one which he ... More...

Just savour that zero above: a clean sheet at home in the league. It's taken over half a season, but we done it. Right, having got that over with, what else is there to talk about? Back to the 3-5-2, although with both wide guys getting back well, I guess it's more like what we'd consider a 5-3-2. It was another in what's been a succession of poor opponents at Portman Road over ... More...

One of those games where a second-half revival was inevitable, given how poor we were in the first half, and when that happens your mind often erases any trace of how you were feeling at half-time. So in the half-time discussions, me'n'the missus resolved this time *not* to let the handful of diabolical performances we'd just witnessed go unremarked in the post-match analysis, as so often is the case. Come on, this was ... More...

Walsall on Saturday were one of the poorest sides we've entertained this season, and today we got another well-below-average outfit, of the sort we regularly slip up against. Millwall must have had serious striker-availability problems (you wouldn't start with Steve Claridge nowadays otherwise, unless it was for a bet), and when Claridge finally went off, they had to stick a midfielder up front. But after dominating an uneventful first half without anything to show ... More...

A Question for stattos: when was the last time we did the "double" over three teams before new year? It seems this season there are teams we can beat (Watford, Leicester and Walsall), and teams we can't (er - most others). Walsall, it has to be said, were one of the poorest sides we've seen at Portman Road this season; not terrible, but just completely unremarkable. Of course we should have had the ... More...

A dull game, but I'll take plenty more dull games if the results are like this one. I'm with Big "Fat" Joe here. We've performed better than this - especially the first half-hour against Rotherham - and got nothing from the game. But there were several positives. The attitude looked good for the majority of the match. And we actually took some of our chances (in fact, bizarrely, we took most of them). BFJ ... More...