Why Kieran McKenna's Ipswich Are Perfect For The Premier League
Ipswich Town have reached the Premier League for the first time in over two decades. What's more they've done so while building an incredible reputation for open, dynamic, attacking football.
It's invited all manner of speculation of boss Kieran McKenna's future, but Adam Clery looks at his side to assess exactly why the Premier League might be in for a rude awakening when the Tractor Boys arrive next season.
It's invited all manner of speculation of boss Kieran McKenna's future, but Adam Clery looks at his side to assess exactly why the Premier League might be in for a rude awakening when the Tractor Boys arrive next season.
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00:00 *intro*
00:03 Bonjour, me petty legume and ay-up duck, how's it going?
00:07 Adam Cleary from 442 here, and next season, Ipswich Town will play in the Premier League.
00:13 I am old and tired and haggard enough to recall the John Walks of this world,
00:17 to recall with clarity your Mick Stockwells, but we ain't seen him in the top flight for over 20 years
00:22 until Kieran McKenna bounded them out of League One and into the Premier League across successive seasons,
00:27 and I will now tell you how he did that and why they're going to be so much fun next year.
00:33 Okay, so first off, Kieran McKenna is my age.
00:39 And also Ipswich player 4231.
00:44 Now the way this works is genuinely very innovative, it's incredibly brave, it's aggressive, it's expansive,
00:50 it's attacking, it's direct, they are easily one of the best teams to watch in English football.
00:55 Like no doubt in the last couple of weeks you've seen this goal they scored against Coventry.
00:59 It's a contender for goal of the season in any single league, but I'm here today to tell you
01:04 that is not an unusual goal for Ipswich to score.
01:08 In fact, it contains many of the fundamental building blocks of how they play.
01:13 But what are those building blocks? Well, first I shall cloud the issue,
01:17 and I may have put some kind of cloud effect on here, I don't know if I'm going to have time,
01:20 and then I will make it clear.
01:22 Again, I may just be waving my hands around for no reason.
01:25 Ipswich Town have dominated quite a lot of this season in the Championship.
01:28 I know they didn't win the league, and some people will be a bit funny about that,
01:31 but there were long stretches across the season where they were dominant.
01:35 They scored loads of goals, they conceded relatively few,
01:38 I think they had like the third lowest number of shots against them in the whole league.
01:43 They were a dominant team.
01:45 But the kind of things you normally expect to see from a dominant team,
01:48 especially in a league like the Championship, we do not ever really see from Ipswich.
01:53 And if you look at something like, say, the total number of passes,
01:56 which is something you expect the dominant teams to do well on,
01:59 then sure enough, there's Southampton top, Leicester second, Leeds in fourth,
02:03 they were their big promotion rivals, they were the other dominant teams in the league.
02:08 But Ipswich, all the way down in 10th, below Blackburn,
02:11 who very nearly got themselves relegated.
02:13 Or if you look at the possession statistics from the Championship,
02:16 sure enough, right at the top, there's Southampton, Leicester and Leeds again,
02:19 but we've got to go all the way down to 8th to find Ipswich.
02:23 They still average like 52, 53%, so they do have more of it than the opposition,
02:27 but not so much more than it's part of their play style,
02:30 or ever really even noticeable when you watch them.
02:32 But then you start breaking it down by the types of passes,
02:35 and you should start to see a play style developing in the numbers,
02:38 and you still don't.
02:40 You break it down by short, medium and long passes,
02:42 Ipswich are 9th, 11th and 13th.
02:45 There is not one way of moving the ball they seem to favour over the other.
02:50 Just in case the point I'm trying to make here isn't becoming obvious,
02:53 you do tend to see evidence of a play style in these numbers.
02:56 Like Southampton are the ball on the deck kings of the Championship,
03:00 they top the short passing charts by a mile,
03:03 but then there's an enormous drop off down to 11th for long passes.
03:07 So you can tell straight away, they like to pass it around.
03:09 But then likewise, top of the long passing charts this season are Watford.
03:13 They simply adore to hump it forward,
03:16 but you go to the short passing numbers, they drop all the way down to 14th.
03:19 You can tell they're a very direct team.
03:22 And it's basically the difference, and sorry to use the technical jargon for this,
03:25 between a build up attack and a direct attack.
03:28 In a build up attack you have like, I think it's over 10 passes,
03:31 and they go any which way, and eventually you get a touch in the box.
03:34 Whereas with a direct attack, you have very few passes,
03:37 and they almost all travel forwards, and you get a touch in the box.
03:41 Now you should, theoretically, rank relatively high for one,
03:44 and then comparatively low for another, depending on how you play.
03:47 But Ipswich, whatever play style metric you want to look at, are just in the middle.
03:52 Like even if we use Opta's fancy play style graph,
03:55 like here's all the dominant sort of passing technical teams who are going to win the league,
03:59 they all hang out in this part of the graph.
04:01 And here's all the no-nonsense, just get it up them direct teams,
04:05 they live in that part of the graph.
04:07 And here's Ipswich, just chilling out here in the middle,
04:12 neither one thing nor the other, like clearly they have such a defined play style.
04:17 You saw that goal, but that play style appears to be defined as not having a play style.
04:23 And does that not just fascinate you, like in some weird statistical way?
04:28 Like is that really just me being a nerd?
04:31 Obviously don't answer that.
04:33 So here's the thing, right, all of that, all of that numbers work is just a very elaborate way
04:38 of me saying that what Kieran McKenna has built here cannot be killed by conventional weaponry.
04:44 He has built here a side that absolutely, if it wants to,
04:48 can build patiently through the thirds using excellent technical play and movement.
04:53 But also one that is absolutely capable of going from back to front
04:57 in as few moves as possible to get themselves in on goal.
05:01 This is honestly, I think in English football right now,
05:04 the most intelligent, dynamic side,
05:08 and there's not any single problem another team can throw at them
05:11 that they don't somewhere have an answer for.
05:14 Now what they have here is nominally like a 4-4-2,
05:17 but the way they've sort of tweaked that and made it their own is just genuinely so clever.
05:22 Two of the most important players in this, and just a heads up,
05:24 I'm probably going to call every single player one of the most important players,
05:27 that's just how well the system is, Hutchinson and Chaplin,
05:30 they are nominally the left-sided attacker and the number 10,
05:33 but what they are in actuality is two very attacking, very narrow, sort of second strikers.
05:39 Leif Davis is the left-back equivalent of a wolf in sheep's clothing,
05:43 which is to say he wears the number three and he does start here,
05:45 but he will also run all the way up there and eat your heart out of its very chest.
05:49 From there, you'd sort of expect the rest of the defence to shuffle over into a back three,
05:53 and they quite often do.
05:55 Obviously Axel, I know it's Twanzaby, is it?
05:58 Yeah, I know. I had him on football manager, I've been stressing about this all day,
06:02 I had him on football manager when he was like 17, and my brain read it as "Tuanzeeb", right?
06:08 And I've never ever been able to overwrite the part of my brain to fix that pronunciation,
06:13 so I know I'm just going to get it wrong three different ways in this video.
06:17 Twanzaby, he is a centre-back as well as a right-back, so they do shuffle over,
06:21 but what they really do is more fun.
06:23 You heard of an inverted full-back, my friends,
06:25 but meet Massimo Longo, who is the sort of opposite of that.
06:29 He's like a reverted midfielder.
06:32 He doesn't drop into the left-back position fully when Leif Davies goes on his little runs,
06:37 but he does sit in this pocket of space to get loads of good long passing angles.
06:42 And you can see that writ large in his heat map from the Huddersfield game,
06:46 because remember, this is like a sitting number six in a pair of defensive midfielders, theoretically.
06:51 You'd expect to see him way more in the centre of the pitch,
06:54 but he just fills that gap behind Davies, whether it's advanced or whether it's deep,
06:58 and he plays the ball forward.
07:00 Long passes isn't accurate.
07:02 If I show you his FB ref staff, they don't look amazing,
07:05 but just look at the number of passes into the final third.
07:08 Look at the number of progressive passes.
07:10 His job is to get on the ball in space and play it forward.
07:14 And again, when you look at Ipswich Town and try and find the easy answer
07:17 in either the numbers or the shape, you don't get one.
07:20 This is a really lopsided sort of build-up structure,
07:23 but there's loads of things they can do with it.
07:25 Like quite often, you'll see the other central midfielder, usually Sam Morsi,
07:28 he'll tuck in, twanzy, ba-dab-a-doo-ba-dab, he'll push up, and you get this 2-3.
07:33 But then if the opposition are set up in a way that counters this quite well,
07:36 the centre-backs will split really wide, the goalkeeper will then get involved,
07:40 they'll go a little narrower, and they'll get a whole new range of passing angles.
07:43 And this is where, probably for the first time in the video,
07:46 you're going to understand why I bored you to death with all those numbers at the start, right?
07:50 This is the build-up structure of a team that loves to pass the ball around,
07:53 and yet Ipswich's numbers don't tell you that's what they are.
07:56 The idea with having so many different combinations and shapes and options
08:00 in this deep build-up is because they are trying at all times
08:04 to invite the press on from the opposition.
08:06 They want you to commit as many men forward as you can,
08:09 because they will hurt you in the easiest possible way.
08:13 They have a near-perfect mastery of the distance to leave
08:17 between their various lines when they've got possession,
08:20 so they can move it through the opposition, if there are gaps, very quickly.
08:24 It's not that three passes into the forward and they're on the halfway line,
08:27 it's usually three passes into the forwards and they're on the edge of the box.
08:30 Likewise, if, say, the full-back gets attracted to Hutchinson
08:33 as he moves into the middle of the pitch, Davis will exploit that space
08:36 and will go long into the gap he's left.
08:39 But a personal favourite of mine is they're also not afraid to just stick it directly into the mixer.
08:44 George Hurst and Kiefer Moore have got two brilliant options
08:47 for winning headed balls and knocking it down to any of the forwards you get around it.
08:51 But also, plot twist, sometimes they'll just move the mixer.
08:56 I tragically could not find a good video example of this,
08:58 because there are sufficient highlights of it which do not exist on the internet.
09:02 But quite often, just the big lad will move right onto the tiny full-back of the opposition team,
09:07 they'll kick it long into him, he will bully him in the air,
09:10 and they'll play sort of horizontally across the pitch from there.
09:13 I've seen them do it, it's really funny.
09:15 And when they get that ball in the final third, and oh boy do they get that ball in the final third,
09:20 they are as lethal as a treble vodka in a bar with no hygiene certificate.
09:24 Here's a fun little quiz for you, which of the following three is true?
09:27 Right, Leif Davis has the most chances created in the Championship last season
09:31 out of A) all the English players, B) all the full-backs,
09:36 or C) all the lads whose names are a component part of a tree.
09:40 Haha, I fooled you, it's literally all of those.
09:43 He is the top chance creator in the Championship last season,
09:47 not from 10, or from wide, or from anywhere, from left-back.
09:51 And then there is Amari Hutchinson, who I cannot say enough good things about.
09:54 Here is his heat map, like he obviously does stay on the left, because that's where he's positioned,
09:58 but look how much of his time is in that central number 10 area.
10:02 Look how freely he floats into that area to get on the ball and make things happen.
10:07 And his numbers this season, man, aye, aye, aye,
10:10 like he is not a Championship player in a million years.
10:14 He should absolutely be in the Premier League, like his direct running, his carries, his take-on threat,
10:19 like just what he does with the ball at his feet and a little bit of space,
10:23 like it's so easy for him. He looks like he's playing with headphones in.
10:28 And then right next to him, and admittedly, yes, this one doesn't look as impressive immediately,
10:32 is Connor Chaplin, who is like the late box-crashing just workhorse out of this little group of three.
10:38 Like you can see, he's very busy and he pops up everywhere, and that's very important,
10:41 but just this little concentration in the box here,
10:45 that is somebody whose job is to not be a 10 and to not join the midfield,
10:50 that is someone whose job is to sniff out opportunities, get at them.
10:54 And that's how this little threesome works, like you've got a big lad who will attract defenders and create space,
10:59 and then two players whose job is to not get on the ball and pass it around,
11:03 but to drive into that space, knowing the service is going to come from elsewhere in the pitch.
11:07 It's effectively like a narrow forward three.
11:10 And if it does indeed click, which I've just done for some reason,
11:13 in case you didn't know what click meant for Ipswich Town in the Premier League next season,
11:16 something you're going to see an awful lot of is their patented cutback.
11:20 Because if you've got two guys who love to feast on the attacking threat that is on offer,
11:25 it pays to serve them up something delicious.
11:28 Ipswich scored just an absolute boatload of these goals this season.
11:32 Leif Davis, and it was normally Leif Davis, gets around the back.
11:35 The defence are attracted to the obvious run and to the big man,
11:39 leaving a little bit of space for somebody else to receive in a position like this and just bury it.
11:44 In fact, and I forgot to look this up before I started filming the video, so I might get it wrong,
11:48 I think the most common assist combination in the Championship last season was Davis to Connor Chaplin.
11:57 That could be totally wrong, but even if it is, the vibes are right.
12:02 [Music]
12:05 And then, sorry, no, we're not done yet. There is one more thing here.
12:09 And then when they have the ball at this end of the pitch, when they have the other team penned in,
12:13 then you can finally see a play style borne out in one particular statistic.
12:19 Top of the very Championship last year for the number of high turnovers,
12:23 which means when you win the ball back in the opponent's defensive third,
12:27 and second for the number of shots coming from a high turnover.
12:32 When Ipswich lose the ball in this area, they really aggressively push up.
12:35 They try and force the opposition out wide because of that.
12:38 You know that theory about how the touchline basically counts as an extra defender.
12:42 So you push them out there, you get a numerical advantage in a manner of speaking.
12:46 Then they turn it over. And because these three sit so compact together,
12:49 it's easy to get the ball into them when the opposition is starting to space themselves out,
12:54 and they can produce chances. And of all that, my friends, sounds really exciting.
13:00 That's because it f***ing is.
13:03 They were the Championships joint top scorers last season.
13:07 They had the most number of shots. They had the most number of shots on target.
13:11 They had the highest number of shots. And I love the statistic that came directly from having another shot.
13:18 But here's the thing. This is all very good and very exciting, but it counts for absolutely nothing
13:21 if they go up to the Premier League and they get really quickly figured out,
13:25 if they can't implement this style of play, if they just get sort of done by better sides.
13:29 And the reason I front loaded this video with so much dry numerical statistical chat
13:35 is to show you that there is not one clear play style for the opposition to figure out.
13:40 There's not one style they're relying upon to carry them through.
13:43 They are adaptable. They are flexible. They are dynamic.
13:47 And watching them play that way, they don't feel like a team from the Championship about to move up a division.
13:53 They feel like a mid-table Premier League side who should be absolutely fine.
13:59 And I know it's not as easy as that in real life. It is going to be really difficult for them.
14:03 And there's going to be long periods where they struggle and they are going to have to make changes.
14:07 But what have you learned today, if not that this is the team that's amazing at making changes?
14:13 But, I don't know, last time Ipswich Town were in the Premier League, I had a big Britney Spears poster on my wall
14:18 and bed sheets that you could conceive of a snap in half.
14:21 So please let me know what you think they're going to do in the Premier League next season.
14:24 Will they be safe? Will they struggle? Is Kieran McKenna going to do some wonderful, wonderful things?
14:28 All thoughts, all feelings, all opinions, welcome to Safe Space.
14:32 Now if you have found this video at all educational, please do consider hitting the subscribe button.
14:36 I say this every single video, regular subs, I know you're sick to death of hearing it,
14:39 but that does really help us out. If you dig our jam, man, and maybe want to see more of it,
14:45 that's the way to do it. And also it makes me look like I'm doing a good job.
14:49 And that's all I have in my life. You can get me across every conceivable social media at Adam Cleary there.
14:53 That is C-L-E-R-Y, four or two socials in the corner of the video.
14:56 I still haven't got upstairs. I've got the new issue of the mag.
15:00 So it looks like this. It's on sale now, but it's got Euro stuff on it.
15:04 It's like Harry Kane's there and I think Andy Robertson. I'll bring it down for the next video, I promise.
15:10 But until that time, until such a time as the next video happens, Ipswich Town.
15:15 I love Ipswich Town. So put another dime in the jukebox, baby.
15:20 Yeah, you're right. That is the worst outro I've ever done. Goodbye.
15:24 Bye.