Ipswich v Arsenal, injuries and the need for more of a gap

 

• Ipswich v Arsenal and more thoroughly shocking referee figures
• Ipswich v Arsenal: the preview and the days of scoring five (or more)

By Tony Attwood

Ipswich go into this game with both injuries and history (not to mention the league table) against them.  They have seven players unavailable and one rated at 50/50 for the game.  Arsenal have four players ruled out and one with only  25% chance of being fit.

Those ruled out for Arsenal are Gabriel Jesus, Tomiyasu, Gabi Magalhaes, Jorginho and Kai Havertz.   Calafiori is expected to be available for the PSG game but not for Ipswich.

Moving on, the Ipswich story in terms of managers is of interest.  For in the year 2021, the club had no fewer than five managers: Paul Lambert, Matt Gill, Paul Cook, John McGreal and Kieran McKenna.   Now to be fair Gill only lasted a couple of days (but the club did win the one game he oversaw) and McGreal went on for ten days (although he did manage to oversee four games in those ten days!)

But then they appointed  Kieran McKenna on 16 December 2021 and he’s been running the show ever since, taking the club out of League One and then out of the Championship (although now also seemingly out of the Premier League).  So their rise has been dramatic, and it might be that the club will recognise his value in giving them a season’s worth of Premier League money plus the solidarity payments before going back to the Championship, where they can possibly use the money with a certain amount of sense.

What they don’t have of course is a big stadium – it holds 30,056, under half of the Arsenal’s capacity.  But then we might also remember that the Brentford stadium only holds 17,250 so Ipswich is not by any means the smallest ground.

And generally, they don’t seem to mind, their status.  For while other clubs lacking in trophies, such as Tottenham, seem to be sullenly ignoring the fact that they have been saved from the drop by there being three teams even more awful than they are, Ipswich seem more accepting of their fate.

But for Arsenal,  this is still, nonetheless almost a birrthday to celebrate, and it involves Ipswich once again.   As Arsenal beat Ipswich on 21 April 2002 as part of an 11 match winning streak that started on 30 March that year with a 3-0 saunter against Sunderland and ended on 11 May with a 4-3 win over Everton.   It left the top  of the league reading 

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Arsenal	34	22	9	3	70	33	37	75
2	Liverpool	35	22	8	5	58	26	32	74
3	Manchester United	35	23	4	8	86	44	42	73
4	Newcastle United	35	20	7	8	68	46	22	67

 

Arseenal won each and every one of their last ten games to win the league with a seven-point margin and also threw in the FA Cup as well for another lovely double.

Now of course there is a chance, as the Guardian mentions, that Arsenal might be “too distracted by a golden opportunity to rule Europe,” to play well today, but they may also “apply the final blow” so that “Ipswich will go down this weekend if they fail to win and WHAM and Wolverhampton both win. 

Ipswich are 14 points away from safety and have six games to play.   Now since despite all the turning of reality upside down by the media, six times three is still 18, that’s a fairly tight margin.  Apparently this situation “has brought unbridled misery” to the supporters, although I suspect not to the club who have discovered that one season in the Premier League, complete with parachute payments, is quite a nifty financial deal.