Has gut-wrenching injury time at Blackpool ended hopes of Ipswich getting promoted?

During the train ride home from Lancashire late on Saturday evening, I had something of a revelation. It came in the form of a group of Accrington Stanley fans, who boarded the train inexplicably cheerily from their goalless draw at Bolton Wanderers.

We got chatting and I was telling them how awful I think League One is and how gutted I am that we are more than likely going to spend another year in this division.

One of them said to me, ‘You’re not good enough to go up though, are you?’

‘Yes, we are,’ I responded.

We were unbeaten until October, we were only relegated last year, we’ve got the biggest squad in the league… blah, blah, blah.

None of it was enough to convince them, and rightly so.

The hard truth is, we might think this is a terrible league (and the lack of quality in both games and officials certainly lends itself to that argument), but that - sadly - is our level now.

Gone are the days where people hear ‘Ipswich Town’ and think of Sir Bobby Robson and our glory days, Mattie Holland and our stint in the Premier League, or even Mick McCarthy and his budget heroes of 2015.

Instead, they wonder what on earth has happened at Portman Road... and that fall from grace makes my stomach churn.

Pleading for those Accrington fans to ‘just look at our history, because we’re a big club’, was laughable – those years don’t matter anymore. 

We’re going to have to earn our place in the hearts of neutral football fans again, by somehow getting out of this hole we’ve dug.

A game plenty of neutral fans will have loved watching

We spent the first ten minutes trying to work out what formation Lambert had gone for and I think we settled on 3-5-2, but I do wonder how difficult it must be for the players being asked to play different roles so frequently.

Despite this, the first half was a competent performance. 

Blackpool barely tested us because, in my opinion, the defence was solid. I was impressed with how calm Woolfie and Chambers remained and it gave me some level of confidence we could pull out a result.

The trouble is, we weren’t testing their defence either and, as I saw someone on Twitter quip, we should perhaps have brought along a deckchair for their keeper.

Sears and Keane, though working very, very hard, were not producing any real chances of note and, though the Blackpool goal came against the run of play, it felt inevitable when we weren’t taking advantage of the possession we had at the other end of the field.

The second half was far better, perhaps Freddie’s goal instilled a bit of confidence, but we suddenly looked like a team outclassing their opposition, as we should. 

Judge was a handful, and we were constantly pushing forward. Youngster Tyreece Simpson came on and made himself known, he's one to watch I'm sure.

But, again, aside from a couple of infuriating near misses that had us all throwing our hands in the air - there was no end product in that final third.

After several heart-in-mouth moments, we were faced with 30 seconds that I will never forget:

The ball fell to Freddie and he broke away to find himself in a one-on-one with the keeper.

This was it… the fairytale moment for the striker who had just been through a massive injury. He was about to claim the winner for his first full game back in the side.

I felt everyone hold their breath at the same time.

When he finally took his shot, after what felt like an hour of waiting, it was nothing short of heartbreaking to see the ball parried away.

And worse, sent into play for the home team to slot in the back of our own net at the other end.

It was a cruel ending, but we deserved to lose from the simple fact that we couldn’t score.

Lowering the bar… again

Coming into this season, I definitely had a feeling of quiet confidence. This, finally, was going to be a year we could enjoy. 

I fully expected us to go up as champions and I wasn’t being intentionally arrogant – I just really couldn’t see things going any other way.

We had the biggest squad in the league, as Joey Barton moaned earlier in the season, we had a squad of experienced Championship and League One teams. 

And, come on, we’re Ipswich – we love the Championship, so it was surely not going to be long before we made a return to it.

But we were warned; this is a tough league and our team had been badly damaged from the recent years of bad management.

We should have been better prepared for the challenge that lay ahead of us. We should have invested in January. We should have bought a striker. We should have waited before we started singing about winning the league.

I could discuss for hours who I think is to blame for our current predicament and I’ll save the full details for another blog.

But, the short version is that the bear minimum I expected of Lambert this year was promotion and he doesn’t look likely to deliver on that. If he doesn't, I believe he has to go.

For me, the season is near enough over for us. My biggest fear is that the crisis of confidence we’ve been having from the days of Mick McCarthy is still rearing its ugly head.

If we do make it to the play-offs we need to be in a far better frame of mind: we need to be mentally at our best and we need to believe that we can win them.

I don’t think anyone at Ipswich, on or off the pitch, can honestly say they think that right now.

I’ll hold on to the vague hope that we will, of course, because that’s just what you do when you’re a football fan, but I can’t see that happening.

What I can see happening is another rocky year for us Tractor Boys and Girls.