Hostilities resume in the East Anglian derby this weekend, four years and 10 months since Ipswich Town and Norwich City last met. A fixture that may not attract the global audience of other English derbies and one whose nicknames – the Old Farm, El Tractico – carry just the slightest hint of mockery will still be guaranteed to deliver a right old tussle at Portman Road on Saturday lunchtime.
The match has a lot riding on it, and for a number of reasons. The time gap matters, absence not only making the heart grow fonder but spicier too. There’s also some hoodoo in the air: Ipswich have not won the derby in their past 12 attempts. The last time Norwich lost, in 2009, Bryan Gunn was their manager. Now his son, Angus, is the Canaries keeper and during the intervening years a lot has changed. Norwich were on their way to League One in 2009 but returned promptly, won back-to-back promotions to the Premier League, and have spent six of the 14 seasons since in the top flight. Ipswich, meanwhile, have only just clambered out of the third tier, the highlight of 20 years in the doldrums.
In case you’ve missed the news, though, Ipswich are now a different beast. Jousting with Leicester at the head of the Championship, the Tractor Boys look good value for their own back-to-back miracle. What’s more, they play football in the way God (Bobby Robson) intended; fast, intelligent and attacking. A clip of the midfielder Wes Burns’ goal against Coventry this month has had 5m views on X, so aesthetically sumptuous is the move that ends in his trivela strike.
For Brenner Woolley, the chief commentator at BBC Radio Suffolk and the man whose voice has soundtracked Ipswich’s prolonged trials and recent triumphs, there are no words of praise high enough for Kieran McKenna, the man at the heart of the Portman Road renaissance.
“At 35, he’s not much older than some of the squad he inherited but everything I get from the players is utterly positive,” Woolley says of the Ipswich manager. “The way he deals with them, his honesty, his communication, he’s just got this way about it, an attention to detail and also a humility. The bottom line is that he’s intelligent but, as I keep saying to people, he’s a good person too.”
McKenna has taken names such as Conor Chaplin and Sam Morsy and transformed dependable lower-league players into eye-catching talents. His signings – George Hirst, Massimo Luongo, Leif Davis – have elevated the team without disrupting the spirit. His style of play, according to Woolley, is a blend of two of football’s great entertainers. “They play a high intensity, front-foot brand of football,” he says, “and particularly at home, there’s a bit of Bielsa’s Leeds and a bit of Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle about them.”
A relentless press is, inevitably, a feature that recalls Bielsa, a commitment to attacking, to goalscoring, something that evokes Keegan at his 90s best. But Woolley argues that, as yet, McKenna’s Ipswich have not betrayed any of the vulnerabilities familiar from those styles of play. “I think that sometimes people might think that because they play this wonderful brand of attacking football, they might have a soft underbelly,” he says. “But one of the most impressive things about this Ipswich group of players is that they’ve dealt with adversity. They were behind the other night at Watford, they won 2 -1. They were 2-0 down to Cardiff, they came back to win 3 -2. They dust themselves down, they crack on and they deal with things.”
Woolley says most Ipswich fans are confident of victory on Saturday, hopeful that the fallow streak will come to an end. At the same time, he says: “If somebody said you have to lose both games to Norwich but you get promotion, I think 95, 96% of our fans would take that.”
The concept of having bigger fish to fry will be a delectable one for Ipswich supporters, and a fond memory for Norwich fans. Currently there is still trauma afflicting Carrow Road after the brutal ups and downs of the Covid period in which the Canaries went up twice as Championship champions, only to immediately come back down from the Premier League humiliated.
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“Norwich’s last promotion was achieved behind closed doors and since fans returned they have watched a meek Premier League relegation followed by a season and a half of mid-table Championship fodder,” says Woolley’s cross-border colleague, Chris Goreham of BBC Radio Norfolk. “It means it’s now four years since Norwich fans were able to cheer on a consistent, winning team in person. It’s a fanbase desperate for a new cult hero to embrace. Derby day provides the sort of stage on which one might emerge.”
Under their head coach, David Wagner, Norwich are leaky and unpredictable. But they also sit only three points outside the playoffs and after a dreadful run in the autumn have four wins in their past six matches. With all the expectation on Ipswich, it could be that Norwich extend their streak by stealth, though according to Goreham, not many Canaries fans are expecting so.
“Norwich City fans are proud of their recent derby dominance,” he says. “The last time they lost one the iPad hadn’t been launched, Harry Kane had never played a game of professional football and Ed Sheeran was about to start college. That record has never felt more under threat than it does now. Losing it would be a big blow to City supporters but it’s one they are bracing themselves for.”
