Fresh, if that’s the right word, from our narrow victory over Shrewsbury at the weekend, the Lads took on Ipswich, a club a bit of turmoil according to their very own Vital Ipswich blog, which in December reported the banning by the club of the person who’d edited the Ipswich Town forum for donkey’s years. A bit Cookie-esque, eh? Anyway, we won by yet another Wyke goal on the stroke of half time, after the home side lost a man to a red card in the tenth minute. Having controlled the first half in our usual manner - dominate possession but don’t score enough – the home side changed things around and had much more of the ball in the second half - mind, they’d had next to nowt of it in the first half without ever looking like frightening our back line. An injury to Bailey Wright sort of spoiled the night, but hopefully his removal from the field was more to do with the current protocol on head injuries rather than anything serious. Hopefully, as we’re fast running out of central defenders. At the end of the day, to use a proper football phrase, we ran out deserved winners, and as convincing winners as 1-0 winners can be.
It’s hard to believe that it’s less than a year and a half since we last visited Portman Road, bringing back a 1-1 draw thanks to Goochy’s equaliser in August 2019 – after we’d spent half of our pre-match leisure time trying to find a pub that hadn’t gone “home fans only.”