Watford 0 Ipswich Town 1 (21/08/2012)

1. All is unfamiliar. Sunshine and joyous victory in Croydon; torrential rain for the first home game, followed by last-minute defeat to our favourite opponents. The names of the new loan signings currently resemble a set of characters from an obscure role-playing game: “Vydra – The Scorpion” (X-Factor: 4.9); “Abdi – The Thinker” (Patience: 0.7%); “Pudil – The Unknown” (?: ?); “Anya – The Midget” (Turning Circle: 0.1); “Geijo – The Ghost” (Invisibility: 95%); “Beleck – The Giant” (Fear Factor: x3). It’s all a bit weird. There’s a moment when Manuel Almunia cack-handedly fumbles a cross onto the penalty spot and everyone almost breathes a sigh of relief at seeing something so thoroughly in its place.

1a. (Speaking of which, where does the animosity towards Scott Loach come from? These days, the Rookery rarely reacts to anything with such intensity of feeling: vitriol and affection in roughly equal measure and with more than a suggestion of an imminent punch-up between the factions. Why? Genuinely, why? An amnesty from abuse and contradiction for anyone capable of explaining it in plain English in the comments…)

2. Not much sign of familiarity on the newly-laid pitch either. For now, we’re the opposition any self-respecting Championship bovver unit would choose: a team intent on playing a proper, grown-up, like-we’ve-seen-on-the-telly passing game, yet several country miles from realising it in any coherent form. We’re the team Sean Dyche’s Watford would’ve loved to get its snarling teeth into, the buck-toothed wimp with a bit of lunch money in the school playground. We should start thinking up excuses to get out of playing Leeds right now.

These things take time. I’m no great advocate of a passing game…but if that’s the route you really want to take, you have to keep playing through it, you have to keep making positive mistakes, you have to take defeats like this on the chin and move on. You must have some courage, some conviction. It takes months, maybe even seasons. In the meantime, you have an awkward and somewhat tetchy mix: new kids with the technical skills but none of the streetwise stuff, always requiring that fraction more time than is offered; seasoned veterans understanding that, in this league, the ball is a liability as much as an asset.

Thus, we spent the vast majority of these ninety minutes being steered into dark alleys and ruthlessly mugged by a well-equipped Ipswich side. Almen Abdi, in particular, has the air of a visiting royal abandoned by his aides and left to fend for himself in an East End street market. For half an hour, we could barely get over the halfway line without losing possession, the result a seemingly endless series of pacy, direct counter-attacks from the likes of Carlos Edwards and Jay Emmanuel-Thomas. With everything so suffocatingly tight, there must’ve been acres of space elsewhere on the pitch…but we carried little threat of getting in behind Ipswich or of stretching them in wide areas…and we couldn’t get our heads up for long enough to have a look anyway. Really, we were very fortunate indeed to be level at the break.

3. That we carried a greater threat after the arrival of Chris Iwelumo is indisputable. We might well have stolen a win, in fact. But if that’s not where we’re headed in terms of development, it’s slightly irrelevant: it’ll always be easier to play the percentages than to stick with the passing principle, so we learn nothing new and get no closer to our stated ideal. (Three points is always nice, mind…)

I’d be more encouraged by the five-minute spell at the end of that almost irredeemable first half, when, despite all that’d gone before, we finally held onto the ball, started to get it moving at a bright tempo, and exerted some pressure on the Ipswich defence. No chances, but a clear sense of collective purpose…and an immediate response from the stands, starved of attacking football until that point. All is not lost, as long as we remember what we’re trying to do and insistently return to it at every opportunity, even if it went wrong last time. Even if it goes wrong again.

4. If I have an underlying concern, it’s with the defence. A defence that was living a rather charmed life towards the end of last season, exposed by pace and spared by outstanding goalkeeping on a number of occasions. There’s little not to like about Messrs Taylor and Nosworthy, but the absence of Adrian Mariappa’s extra yard is keenly felt…especially when the midfield is lightened by the absence of John Eustace. We haven’t really addressed all of that, have we?

Passing football requires a firm foundation. Looking back at Adrian Boothroyd’s post-Premiership season – yeah, sorry – there was a clear intent towards playing a shorter passing game, for all that history will record yer man as a one-trick donkey with a bit of a wind problem. We frequently started matches with a frenetic and potentially successful interpretation of what we’d picked up in the top flight…and then equally frequently conceded a stupid goal and let it all fall apart. We didn’t ever buy ourselves any time. We went back to being a long ball team – and a lesser one at that – not because we weren’t any good at being more constructive, but because our constructions were built on sand and we didn’t bother to buy any concrete until it was far too late.

Me, I’d like to see some clean sheets.

5. But more than anything, I’d like to believe that we were all prepared to give this six months, a year, whatever. There’s been understandable cynicism about the use of the word “project” in connection with the summer takeover…but that is what it feels like, for better or worse.

Thanks to a variety of factors – the widening gap to the Premiership, increasing parachute payments for the relegated clubs, EPPP, endless recession, and so on – our slice of the football pyramid is under threat like never before. We have to set out what our future will be, a viable and distinct agenda for ourselves rather than the vain hope that we might just survive in a world dominated by a handful of clubs with stratospheric budgets. It feels like we’re doing something in response. Something different, innovative, potentially brilliant, potentially disastrous. But, crucially, something. It’s far too soon for conclusions.