CHRIS COULD DO BETTER – AT 51!
PERCHED behind me at the plush Plough Lane stadium on Tuesday night was the unmistakable figure of Chris Kiwomya.
A man who, by no means classed as a ‘great’ of the game, earned legendary status to a generation of Ipswich fans like myself having never left anything out on the pitch.
Half an hour into Tuesday night’s demoralising 3-0 defeat at AFC Wimbledon, I felt like walking over to my boyhood hero - working as a summariser for BBC Suffolk - handing him over a pair of Puma Kings and sending him pitchside.
Even at the age of 51, he would have still been a marked improvement on the current crop donning the famous blue shirts and iconic club crest.
The hurt on Kiwomya’s face at the back of the stand as Wimbledon celebrated an alltoo-easy victory spoke for us all. With play-off hopes fading as fast as a trademark Kiwomya breakaway, it felt like an all-time low.
New manager Paul Cook – the man given the unenviable task of turning round fortunes at Portman Road - reckons Ipswich fans must be “tired and bored of it now”. You know what Paul, you’re dead right. We are. By rights, Cook should be sitting in one of the most enviable hotseats in the EFL right now following the arrival of
HERO: Chris Kiwomya
The Non-League Paper, new American owners, Gamechanger 20 Ltd.
As we are led to believe, Cook was the first choice of both former owner Marcus Evans and the new regime to lead the club into its exciting new era. But suddenly, after a woeful run of just two wins from his first ten matches in charge, an increasing number of the “tired and bored” diehards are becoming restless once again.
Surely, with no fewer than 16 first-team players out of contract at the end of the season and literally playing for their futures, the club should be enjoying the fruits of their labour, leaving the manager with an almighty headache come the summer.
Now, as it stands, there is no decision to make. It’s obvious it’s time to clear the decks and build from scratch.
While ‘new manager bounce’ has propelled Portsmouth and Charlton above
Town into the play-off places, the question remains… ‘Why hasn’t Cook - one of the game’s brightest young managers with a proud record to boot - got any kind of tune out of this squad of players, built on a budget which dwarfs that of their triumphant hosts on Tuesday night’?
Paul Lambert was sacked on the final day in February on the back of three straight wins over Doncaster, Hull and Accrington so things haven’t got better, they’ve got worse.
Honest
Cook, though, if anything, is refreshingly honest about the situation. But even on the day the club announced that Mark Ashton would come in as their new CEO from Bristol City, he still has no answer to that billion dollar question either, admitting he doesn’t trust the players he’s putting out onto the pitch.
“I am lucky enough and privileged enough to probably have a chance hopefully to try and change a lot of what’s gone on,” he said after the Wimbledon debacle. “That’s what’s going to have to happen now. There’s no throwing players under the bus, no excuses offered. We’re a million miles from a good team, and that includes myself and the staff tonight.
“The best feeling when you’re a manager is when you put a team on the pitch that you trust. I don’t trust our team, I’ve got to be open and say that. That doesn’t mean everyone’s a bad player, it doesn’t mean everyone’s doing something wrong but we’re miles off it.
“Again, I keep going back to our supporters. They’re tired and bored of it now. We have to be better because if we’re not, the changes will keep being repetitive.
“I’m not so sure that keeping changing gets you to where you want to be because somewhere along the line, the anchor has to go in and the badness has to stop and we have to start taking steps forward. We’ve taken a massive step back tonight.”
You won’t find me disagreeing there…
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