Despite their incredible start to the Championship season, Ipswich shouldn’t feel under pressure to advance automatically.
Despite finishing outside of the League One championship the previous season, Ipswich Town has outperformed expectations by holding a top-two spot in the Championship.It wouldn’t be fair to say that Kieran McKenna feels under pressure because nobody anticipated him taking the team this far so quickly.Given their prior top-flight experience and better financial resources, Southampton and Leeds United should be under more pressure to gain promotion to the Premier League.Undoubtedly, Ipswich Town has emerged as the unexpectedwinner in the Championship thus far this year. However, the Tractor Boys have been incorrectly predicted as the team most underpressure to advance.
Still sitting in the automatic spots for a spectacular back-to-back promotion charge, the Suffolk outfit haven’t fallen out of the top two ever since moving clear at the end of September. It’s an incredible feat for a side that didn’t even win the League One title last season, with Plymouth instead pipping them to the post, but they have a real chance of at least making the play-offs and moving into the Premier League that way – though automatic promotion should be targeted at this stage. Kieran McKenna has done a superb job at Ipswich, but calls that they should be the ones feeling the pressure should fall wide of the mark; he wasn’t expected to bring the club this far so early. And that’s whyWhy the pressure shouldn’t be on Ipswich Despite having an outstanding start to the season and recorded the second-best start to a Championship season ever – behind only Leicester this season – the Tractor Boys now sit just three points ahead of Southampton in the automatic promotion race.
On paper, it looks like the side from Suffolk have massively tailed off and look to be crumbling under the expectation that they should’ve been promoted to the Premier League following a startling run that saw them win 12 of their opening 14 games in the Championship. However, they only broke a run of five games without a win in Saturday’s game against Sunderland, but that did include games against arch-rivals Norwich and challengers Leeds and Leicester – so naturally, they are tougher games.A wealth of inexperience has largely been dealt with by McKenna’s men, and their superb, attacking young team initially blitzed almost every team away in the opening third of the campaign, but that could be a reason that they’ve dropped off, alongside the general quality that the money of Southampton and Leeds can afford to buy.
Why the pressure should be on Leeds United and Southampton Southampton had spent every season since the aforementioned 2011-12 campaign in the Premier League, even finishing as high as fifth in one season and boasting the likes of Sadio Mane, Virgil van Dijk and Luke Shaw, amongst others, in their team at certain points. Their relegation last year was somewhat anticipated with recruitment not being overly impressive in years gone by, but the squad they have should be more than good enough to come straight back up with stars such as Adam Armstrong, Carlos Alcaraz and Taylor Harwood-Bellis all at the very least being of Premier League quality.
With Leeds, that is even more accurate. The Whites barely avoided relegation on the penultimate day of 2021–2022, but they ultimately lost because of some disastrous defensive performances that plagued their performance the previous season. However, by loaning out their more expensive stars, like Brenden Aaronson, Max Wober, and Luis Sinisterra, the Whites appear to have played their cards better than the Saints, keeping players like Willy Gnonto, Crysencio Summerville, and Pascal Struijk, while also signing up Ethan Ampadu, Joel Piroe, and Glen Kamara in case they earn promotion to the Premier League come June.
Leeds knows they can count on selling the old crop to compete in the Championship again if they don’t taste promotion, especially with all that money.
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