The View From Churchmans

And so Portman Road bids adieu to one of the least memorable seasons in the thirty years or more that I've been watching the blues, with a pleasant kickaround in the sun - and three points which may give us some hope of finishing higher than the late John Lyall's hopeless 1990/91 squad. The high points of the afternoon probably took place before and after the ninety minutes: Fab getting his player of ... More...

We looked just as bad from the halfway line as we've looked from behind the goal. I'll be back to my old seat next week... Two poor teams, one with a lot more to play for, and it was hard to begrudge Brighton the win. In a way, I can sympathise with end-of-season apathy, because I can hardly be bothered to write a report, but then again, I don't get paid thousands of ... More...

Jeez, where to begin? This was nothing short of appalling. Did you hear Stuart Pearce's "you should be ashamed to go home and face your families" rant to his players the other day? Even that wouldn't have done justice to the dressing-down Joe should have given our team after this. In the week when the club expects everyone to be renewing their season tickets, we get the spectacle of more people making their ... More...

Ipswich Town 1 Hull City 1 Well, a better performance than Millwall, although we probably seemed better than we were thanks to Hull's determination to let us ping it backwards and forwards across the park and then just mop up once we got it in the area. We must have had about twenty goal attempts, and there were some real sitters amongst the missed efforts, so it was probably inevitable that our only ... More...

Ipswich Town 1 Millwall 1 It was always shaping up to be a strange afternoon: almost everyone I normally see at the game seemed to have something else on, but whether they were shopping, delivering beds, playing golf in a blizzard or even running a half marathon, they all probably had a more enjoyable time than I did. This was terrible. An awful Town performance, utterly freezing conditions, and only the inevitable terrace wit ... More...

Not a game you'd regret missing, despite having three points to cheer. It was blummin' freezing, and Leicester have obviously decided that the best way to avoid dropping down as fast as the title "Division One" is to, er, keep it tight at the back. The match was like watching a giant lung; every time Leicester got the ball, all the players squeezed into a circle about 30m diameter, and every time we ... More...

A well-deserved win against one of those teams you get great satisfaction in beating, if only because their single asset is their, er, "robust" attitude. Naturally, we made heavy weather of it, big style. But it was more continuation of the developing younger side, and there were some fine performances. Never has their been a greater indictment of the one-up-front formation, however. As the second half showed, when Lee has to shoulder the entire attacking ... More...

A second consecutive 1-1 draw at home against a Yorkshire side right up the top of the table, where again we played pretty well and might even have won it. Leeds' position in the table flatters them even more than Sheffield's though, and if we'd had this team out from the start of the season (nearly all of them were here then), perhaps we could be up there in this season's distinctly ordinary-looking ... More...

Not a score to be ashamed of, given Sheffield's current position, although I suspect they've flattered to deceive for the first half of the season and will eventually be caught by a better team, like Palace. More importantly though, a continuation of our recent encouraging improvement, and almost faultless performances from the three teenagers who started. We'll probably argue over whether it was a 4-5-1 or a 4-4-2 as usual, but in effect it ... More...

Great buzz before the game: "Deano and Danny Haynes up front!" ("You're kidding, right?") and we all had to agree that with those two, a 4-4-2, and most of the old men absent from midfield as well, many of the supporters had got what they'd been asking for. And if it turned out to be rubbish, it would prove once and for all that supporters know nothing (unlike experienced managers). There was going ... More...

I hope things don't continue this way for too much longer, if only because words really are going to fail me soon. List stattos will, I'm sure, give us the full story, but I'm going to guess that this will be the lowest end-of-December position we've been in since before the Burley era, and what's worse, in the seasons which I reckon come close to this (96/97, 97/98 and ... More...

A more lively performance from Town, for much of the game anyway, but for the second week running we can't complain at coming away with nothing more than a home draw. QPR have a broadly similar record and position in the table to Wolves last week, and the result was similar too, yet this time Joe couldn't be heard telling all and sundry that he was "ecstatic" with a draw and that he'd ... More...

A curiously absorbing game, given that it was between two mid-table teams both playing well below their potential. Sometimes when two teams are so firmly in the "could do better" camp, you wish you'd gone to the International Festival of Boredom instead, but on other occasions, it makes the game open up and there are plenty of chances, even if most of them are squandered. This match was, fortunately, of the second type. With ... More...

Where do I start? Shocking. Everything was wrong: the application, the tactics, the individual performances ...this was just horrible to watch. Losing at home to the best team in the division is acceptable. But the manner of doing it was not. This is not my team at the moment. People argue that a club cannot have a "style"; how is a "club culture" possible in a business where the personnel and management change ... More...

Lesser hacks would describe this as a workmanlike performance (one of those phrases, like "despatched with aplomb", which are only ever used in a footballing context), but as Jean-Luc Godard said, "To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated." We got the result, and things are moving in the right ... More...