Paul Cook’s tenure as manager of ITFC was a disappointing one, lasting just nine months and 36 league games. During that time though, he managed to fail twice with two entirely different squads, and with only the occasional performance good enough to suggest something of his past success at previous clubs.  At the basest level he just wasn’t very good at winning football matches here, just eleven league wins plus another two from eight cup games.

When Cook was appointed, in March 2021, he inherited a decent third-tier squad seventh in the table with 16 matches remaining.  There were some flaws in the squad, but still enough players capable of performing better than they had under Paul Lambert that season to think that the impetus of a new manager might be enough to reach the play-offs.  Indeed, Cook himself spoke about the top two being an outside possibility at his first press conference. 

Instead, only four wins from 16 matches saw Town stumble to a ninth placed finish.  And yet, that was only five points away from sixth-placed Oxford: turning three draws into wins would have been enough for the play-offs.  Worse than results were the disjointed performances, the inability to play for 90 minutes and litany of poor goals conceded.  It wasn’t that anyone expected Cook to have a team playing as he wanted it instantly, or even by the end of that season, but that there was little sign of him bringing anything new to the existing team in terms of motivation or organisation.  Indeed, the team performed worse than under Lambert, managing 1.18 points per game compared to 1.67 for the 30 games that season prior to Cook’s arrival. 

Cook’s response was to hide behind his players, far too many post-match press conferences featured some variation on ‘I’m not going to blame the players, but it’s the players’, that went down well enough with plenty of fans at the time.  Clearly, Cook wasn’t wholly to blame for a second mid-table finish in a row, Lambert’s seeming lack of interest in his job after the Covid-induced hiatus was a large part of it too, but he was appointed with an immediate aim of promotion, or at worst the play-offs and failed to seriously challenge for either.

In April 2021, a month after Cook was appointed, the Gamechanger takeover was confirmed.  This seemed to take him by surprise despite plenty of clearly informed press coverage in the weeks leading up to it; maybe he was just the last person around to take a promise from Marcus Evans at face value. 

Although new Chairman Mike O’Leary offered public support for Cook, local journalists were sure that he had been very much a Marcus Evans appointment not a Gamechanger one.  What the takeover did do though was to provide an opportunity for Cook to bring in his choice of players to fit the 4-2-3-1 system he wanted to utilise.

And so to a Summer of change; ITFC signed 19 senior players whilst a similar number left the club.  There were legitimate concerns that that amount of change might mean that Ipswich wouldn’t start the season well as not all players would be ready – indeed, the 2009-10 and 2018-19 seasons which were also preceded by a high turnover of players didn’t go particularly well – but they were mitigated by the budget and the general quality of player signed.   It was up to Cook and his coaching team to make them into an effective unit.

That coaching team though raised more doubts, Leam Richardson, Cook’s assistant at Chesterfield, Portsmouth and Wigan, declined an invitation to join, opting to stay as manager at Wigan whilst two of the coaches appointed, former Town player Gary Roberts and former Wigan kitman Ian Craney, had limited coaching experience.  The third, former loanee Franny Jeffers, did have coaching experience with Everton Under-23s but he also had two recent convictions – one for threatening his ex-wife and another for drink driving – that made his appointment less than desirable.

Not all of the players were signed in time for the opening match of the season against Morecombe but, with a(n almost) new manager and after a 17 month break from watching matches normally, fans were looking forward to the season.  The team started, as expected, in a 4-2-3-1 formation with both full backs pushing forwards, and the two central midfielders mainly sitting but looking to switch play quickly.  It didn’t quite work, and the three behind the striker drifted in and out of the game, and defensively it was fairly poor but a bold substitution – putting on two strikers with 10 minutes to go – was sufficient for Macauley Bonne to score a late equaliser for his home-town club.  Still, the structure and gameplan seemed clear even if it was going to take a bit more work to fine tune it.

Or perhaps a lot more work, that opening match was followed by two away defeats and a further two draws in the league, in three of those matches Ipswich were ahead but failed to win.  There was an obvious weakness off the ball and a vulnerability to conceding goals without being under any great pressure.  The signing of midfielder Samy Morsy, right at the end of the transfer window, was touted by Cook as a solution, the player bringing “an element to the side that we’re probably lacking at the moment”.  Maybe so, but we had left it a little late to bring that leadership in if it was quite so necessary.

September started with a calamitous 5-2 home defeat to a Bolton team who exploited vulnerabilities time and time again, but results did pick up after that and, at the seventh time of asking, Town won away at Lincoln.  That was followed up by another draw and a 6-0 hammering of a poor Doncaster team with Morsy exceptional.  In hindsight perhaps the most telling aspect of that match had been the 15 minutes after half-time when, at 2-0 up the team didn’t seem to know what to do and would likely have conceded to a better team, but at the time it was reasonable to assume that Cook had got the team working.

Except that four days later at Accrington a fairly comfortable 1-0 lead became a 2-1 deficit as Ipswich lost any ability to hold onto the ball.  Despite that, October saw three wins and a draw from six matches.  That draw was equally frustrating, a very comfortable 2-0 lead at Cambridge given up by a combination of poor defending, lots of possession without creating chances and a late equaliser.  Improved form certainly but not necessarily enough to make up for the poor start.  A run of five matches against sides in good form would be more telling about how much progress Ipswich were making.

The second of those was by far the best of Cook’s 44 at Ipswich, a slow start and goal deficit were soon forgotten after a fluid attacking performance, and some excellent defending produced a 4-1 win at Wycombe.  That was the point where things might have gone differently for Cook: had he followed that up properly then he would still be Ipswich manager.

Instead, performances fell away, the goals dried up and wins became difficult again.  The same failings – poor positioning off the ball, possession without creating chances , an inability to play for 90 minutes – were visible too often.  The non-performance against Rotherham was very similar to a similar non-event at home to Hull a year previously, progress was hard to see and stumbling past two League Two sides in cup competitions merely compounded the sense of inadequacy.  By the time of Cook’s last league game against Crewe at the end of November there was a collection of talented players in blue shirts on the pitch but no semblance of a team, that the match was won by two pieces of individual skill was rather telling.  Eleventh place in the table after 20 matches was nowhere near good enough given a budget that is almost certainly in the two largest in the division.

Cook can really have few complaints about his sacking.  Even if he wasn’t the first choice of Gamechanger he was well backed in the Summer to bring in players that he wanted, for the system that he wanted to play.  The roots of his failure here lie largely in the inadequate coaching team and the overly high turnover of players.  The result of both was a team that was consistently poor off the ball and only sporadically capable of putting together fluent attacking performances but not able to grind out results either.  Only once in 36 league matches under Cook did Ipswich win two in a row.  This is the third division, it really shouldn’t have been this difficult.