As the old saying goes: it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in. With the court of public opinion delivering ever-more damning verdicts on Paul Lambert, and Lambert getting ever spikier in his defence, that same sense of weariness, bordering on cynicism, feels increasingly applicable to the home dug-out at Portman Road: it doesn’t matter who gets the Ipswich job, the Ipswich manager always gets in.
Every appointment made by Marcus Evans has followed the same trajectory, so repetitive and predictable that you could plot it as a curve on one of those line graphs which are so en vogue just now. An initially cautious welcome is followed by a fleeting, thrilling sense that this one might, just might, be the manager to turn Ipswich around, only for that optimism to be steadily overtaken by a nagging realisation that the new boss is – once again – the same as the old boss, and from thereon, the spiral into a depressing and mutual cycle of frustration, anger, and bitterness between manager and supporters. Mick McCarthy’s curve took six years to hit the foot of the y axis: Paul Hurst’s only took five months, but the pattern was the same, and it’s happening again with Paul Lambert.
At the time of writing, Ipswich are 5th in League One but in desperately poor form: more importantly, the relationship between Lambert and the supporters has gone beyond the point where it appears to be repairable. Lambert has crossed a line for many fans by singling out TWTD’s Phil Ham for treatment which it’s hard to see as anything other than vindictive. After the 0-0 draw at Oxford United, Lambert came out windmilling at journalists, holding them, rather than himself or any of his colleagues, responsible for the “negativity” around the club. It’s all gone a bit Trump.
And, just like Trump’s departure from the White House, what happens next will take more time than many observers would want, but it feels inevitably as though the long, slow, and by now depressingly familiar trudge from the manager’s office to the exit door is underway. Someone is getting ready to do a search & replace on the names in the “Ipswich Town have today parted company with….” press release, to be followed a few days later by an announcement of the next tracksuited rider on the world’s dullest rollercoaster. Might as well book Four Seasons Total Landscaping for their unveiling to the media, for all the credibility it’ll have.
By now, however frustrated they may be with the latest managerial failure, most supporters must surely acknowledge that if every single manager is failing – and not only failing, but failing corrosively – then the real problem is not the manager, and the real solution is not to find another fall guy who can take the heat off the owner for a while before making way for the next one. There’s something more fundamentally wrong with the culture and ethos of the club – an acceptance of mediocrity, of low professional standards, which is now hard-wired into the entire operation.
There are people in the club who have tried, and are trying, to alter that, but change of this magnitude has to be led from the top - not by words, but by actions. No doubt Marcus Evans is wondering whether the latest bout of ill-feeling merits another of his public pronouncements (these tend to appear as intersections on the managerial line-graph curve, as it starts to head downwards), whether it’s time for another scattering of breadcrumbs to the starving masses. Surely, this time, supporters won’t gobble it all up with pathetic gratitude. It takes more than the owner talking to fix this, it takes him listening. (I just spent a few minutes browsing the “Communications” section of the Marcus Evans Professional Training brochure, thinking that it would have been vaguely amusing if they were offering a course on Active Listening, which I could have pointed out the irony of. But they don’t. In fact, listening doesn’t appear to feature in the syllabus of any of their Communications courses. Which may tell its own story).
The one thing that Paul Lambert has done which is distinct from his predecessors is to firstly recognise the importance of the bond between the club and its community, and then to take action to rebuild it. You wonder, though, whether that relationship is damaged beyond repair. When Lambert reached out to supporters, and offered not only a hand of friendship, but an acknowledgement that it was long overdue, it was gratefully seized upon – but it was always going to be a fragile peace. “We know we messed up, but we can change!” was Lambert’s message when he arrived. “Great!” said the fans. A few months later, and we’re into the “You said you would change but you lied!” vs “Yeah…. but what about that thing you did that really annoyed me?”-type arguments. Again. It’s really boring.
Like any broken relationship, it takes a lot of work on all sides to properly repair it, but the question right now is whether anyone at the club really really cares enough to do the soul-searching and bridge-building that’s required to make up for 13 years of neglect and contempt.
And – here’s the harder question – do we, as supporters, really care, really feel enough to do whatever’s necessary to force a change? It shouldn’t be down to us, of course, but there’s not much effort forthcoming from the other side of the room. We’ve tried voicing our anger and sadness from the stands, and it hasn’t worked. We’ve tried concerted efforts, from those same stands, to restore some pride and passion, hoping it would be reciprocated, and that hasn’t worked either. What’s next? Raising the same voices louder seems unlikely to make any difference: each time things have reached an “all-time low”, supporters have shouted about it with articulate feeling, but all that’s happened is that the “all-time low” bar has been, well, lowered.
What else can we do? We could certainly be better at mobilising, but do we have the collective energy and commitment to follow the example of other clubs’ supporters, who’ve managed to force a regime change with organisation and strategy? If that’s not viable – and there are significant practical and financial barriers to it – then the only other option is to walk away, to withdraw our support, in an attempt to shift the dynamic from “we’re going to keep telling you what needs to change until you change it” to “you won’t see us again until things change”. But do we even have the energy for that? Are we so hard-wired into that same acceptance of mediocrity – whether it’s manifested by schlepping through the turnstiles or by wearily logging into iFollow – that we can’t even motivate ourselves to break those habits?
Just like the next Prime Minister isn’t really on your side any more than the current one is, the next manager of Ipswich Town isn’t going to be a force for change any more than any of the others who’ve smiled and grinned awkwardly at the cameras on their first day as a Marcus Evans employee. The question we should be asking is not who we want to be the next Ipswich manager, but how we make sure that we won’t get fooled again.