Leeds United are off to Portman Road this weekend to find out whether Ipswich Town’s grudge with Norwich will extend to us now we’ve got Daniel Farke in charge. Whatever the feelings about our manager across the East Anglian barricades, I just hope they leave little Sam Byram out of it. But what else is there between us and Ipswich, and what have they been up to while we were busy trying to be good?

Last time

My report on our last visit to Ipswich reads now like a hallucinated premonition. It was the last game of the regular season before we played in the play-offs with Derby, and as rehearsals go, it was a bit too on-point. What’s that, our goalie Kiko Casilla and one of our defenders, Luke Ayling, leaving a ball to each other and letting Collin Quaner score? At least nobody could say they hadn’t been warned, ten days later, as half-time was blowing against Derby at Elland Road. At Portman Road the mistake made Ipswich’s winner in a 3-2, but it wasn’t even Casilla’s first interesting contribution to the game, as their opening set-piece goal came from him committing a foul about a hundred miles out of goal. Otherwise, Leeds actually played well and scored a couple of lovely goals, but Town – who finished absolute last in the Championship – scored three for only the second time all season just by, well, going forward a bit. Oh and Kemar Roofe missed the chance to put us 3-2 up by falling over while taking a penalty.

Their story since then

With Paul Lambert staying in charge, Town ticked along alright in League One until Covid-19 foreshortened the next season and stranded them 11th. It was pretty much the same again for the following campaign but mid-table was no longer enough, so Lambert was out in February after fans, still locked out of games, turned up to protest at training and their flares set fire to a fence. He was followed out in April by longstanding owner Marcus Evans who sold to a US investment group calling itself ‘Gamechanger 20 Ltd’. Lambert’s replacement, Paul Cook, lasted until December when he called unhappy supporters ‘drama queens’, got sacked, and Kieran McKenna took over. Formerly assistant at Old Trafford to Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjær, 37-year-old McKenna has become the hip choice for the future of football by getting Ipswich up last season in 2nd place, scoring 101 goals while conceding just 35 despite having Richard Keogh in the team. “I was the eight-year-old sitting up watching a League Two game in the spare room while the rest of the family had the TV on elsewhere,” McKenna told The Guardian, and he had Ipswich playing like a League One Brighton, with the goalie standing still on the ball and all that stuff.

Their situation now

Richard Keogh has gone to Wycombe, so that’s a relief, and Town are played three won three and leading the Champo, which is weird. Clearly McKenna is building his team around our old left-back, Leif ‘very good’ Davis, who got a bewildering fourteen assists last season – nobody at Ipswich made more – and already has one this time. Because I hate myself, I’ve just trawled stats websites for League One coverage until I confirmed that he also got four pre-assists, and then I’ve thought about Junior Firpo, and now I’ve started feeling sad. Up front, they have George Hirst, son of Sheffield Wednesday legend David. If David Hirst had just moved to Old Trafford when Alex Ferguson wanted him to, we would never have sold them Eric Cantona, but the bigger problem will probably be that Junior Hirst, after a high profile start at Leicester, has starting scoring goals.

Always remember

“Ips… Ips – bitch?”
“Ipswich. Ipswich.”
“Ips – ?”
“Ips – wich.”
“Ips, schwish – okay I give up.”

Our Rob just wrote about a Tony Yeboah hat-trick that demolished Ipswich 4-0 at Elland Road in 1995, while I’m fond of our 4-2 defeat at Portman Road in October 1992 only because while scoring with a low header Gary Speed’s mullet looked magnificent.

Back at Elland Road, in 2012, commentating for Yorkshire Radio, here are some of the best Eddie Gray giggles you could ever hope to hear:

This reminds me of my all-time favourite Eddie Gray giggles; laughing at Ipswich alongside @Thomkirwin back in 2012#LUFC pic.twitter.com/7mbLlOXNIn

— MoxcowhiteTSB (@MoscowhiteTSB) February 24, 2019

Better to forget

Relegation from the Championship in 2006/07, to the third tier for the first time in our history, was all but mathematically confirmed by a 1-1 draw with Ipswich at Elland Road. The game was held up by a pitch invasion when Leeds fans tried to get the match abandoned by throwing stuff at the bemused away fans in the Cheese Wedge. Not a fun day out for anybody, really. Additionally, the ‘played for both’ selections are the stuff of nightmares: Alex Bruce, Matt Pennington, Toumani Diagouraga, David Norris, Luke Varney. It’s like the incantation to summon some terrible 2010s Champo curse. Thank heavens for Richard Naylor, whose willingness to join Leeds from Ipswich was not a surprise to the teammates at Portman Road who’d been listening to him singing ‘Marching on Together’ in the showers. ⬢