I suggested after the last defeat that it might be a good idea for Tony to experiment a little... didn't exactly mean like this though. What a bizarre team selection. Hopefully Reading aren't up for it tonight.

Good luck to Blackpool. Their fans have been through hell. In 2012 I thought we had the worst owners in the country, but the Oystons said "hold our beers" and made Venky's look almost benevolent in comparison.

In fairness it was the first half where we were abysmal, we did improve in the second half but still looked useless going forward. Dack wasn't playing though which largely explains that. I don't think we can call ourselves unlucky in that match considering we got two penalties! We let in two very poor goals and if you can't keep it tight at the back you'll never get anywhere, as history has proven time and time again. It's an area Mowbray doesn't seem to consider important which is a big concern.

We would have lost to Reading if not for the generosity of Paul McShane. We were absolutely appalling in that match, two down after 25 minutes and defensively all over the place. Clawed back a point with two penalties, didn't look like we'd score from open play in a million years. We've improved since then but anybody thinking tonight will be an easy three points has already forgotten how poor we are and have been the entire season defensively. Only Ipswich, Rotherham and Villa have conceded more than us. Reading have actually conceded 44 compared to our 47, but they've score 10 less goals than us which puts them in the position they're in.

An impressive win for Bolton tonight against BIG club, away from home as well.

I think it's only the second proper interview Evans has given in the last six or seven years. To be honest he comes across as a sensible and decent bloke. Ipswich are 14/15th in terms of Championship wages so it's not like they're criminally underspending. He just made a terrible, terrible mistake in appointing Paul Hurst, I'm not sure I've ever seen one manager have such a devastating affect on a team in such a short space of time- and I would even include Steve Kean in that. Hurst ripped the spine out of the team and replaced it with lower league quality. He destroyed morale both on the pitch and behind the scenes. It's really amazing how badly Hurst screwed Ipswich over. I think the majority of neutrals expected Ipswich to struggle this year, but to only have three wins by mid-February is shocking. They've totally collapsed. Ipswich have a lot of loan players who will leave, which should give scope to bring in a few decent players next season. Looking at the players they have on permanent deals, they have the foundation for a decent L1 team. I'd expect Bialkowski and Knudsen to go (and before anyone says anything, no, we don't want them, no better than what we already have), but there shouldn't be much more movement in terms of outgoings. Gerken should be a good enough GK for League 1, and they've got the likes of Chambers, Skuse, Nsiala, Nolan, Edwards, Harrison, Jackson, Ward, Spence, Judge and Huws who should all be competitive at that level. They'll need reinforcements across the defence and probably up front as well, but theoretically their senior pros should give them a solid base to build from assuming most of them aren't sold. In terms of youngsters they've got Lankester, Bishop, Dozzell, Nydam and Downes who have all shown a lot of potential this season. If Ipswich keep hold of them and use next season to really blood them into the team then, again, they should have a solid base to work from. It'll be interesting to see if any of those players are poached when Ipswich take the drop. If Evans if serious about getting the club promoted at the first attempt he'll do everything he can to keep those players. So, it's not all doom and gloom for Ipswich. There are some good players in there, but it'll all come down to how many leave the club and whether the manager - whether that be Lambert or somebody else - can erase the losing mentality they've picked up this season and mount a serious promotion push.

He recently did an interview where he said over the past year or so he's become much more hands on. Basically the club was running itself with Mick at the helm, but with him leaving and the upheaval it caused he felt he had no choice but to get involved. Obviously it hasn't worked out very well so far, but if he wants Ipswich back up at the first attempt he needs to stick with Lambert (assuming he stays) and back him with a reasonable budget. Ipswich are going to need some surgery in the summer to be competitive in L1, but it can be done. They have to hold on to their younger stars (as we did with Nyambe, Lenihan, Raya, etc) and bring in some wise old heads who know how to get the job done. That's where Lambert needs to earn his crust and use his contacts to bring in players that can do the job, as he did for us with the likes of Graham and Bennett.

They extended it for a year a couple of months ago. https://www.eadt.co.uk/sport/freddie-sears-contract-extended-1-5818710

The Villa/Lambert debate reminds me a bit of the Ipswich/McCarthy debate - was the shit football down to the manager's preference or a neccessity in order to get the best out of very limited players with hardly any resource to strengthen? As far as Ipswich and McCarthy were concerned I'd say the latter, I can't say I saw enough of Villa under Lambert to make a solid judgement - but they've been going downhill since he left which suggests a structural problem rather than it being purely down to the manager. I think your conclusion is harsh to be honest but I'm not interested enough in Lambert's career to start researching in depth! I think he was a good manager in his younger days, the Villa job ground him down and now he's an average manager at best. Put him in a mid-table team and he'll basically keep them mid-table. Put him in a relegation-threatened team and they'll more or less stay in the same position. I don't think he's a bad manager but I don't think he's a good one at the moment either. Just somewhere in between.

The problems with Hurst went beyond just results on the pitch - I think if it was just results they may have stuck with him longer. Unfortunately for him he managed to alienate a lot of players and backroom staff as well, and that added pressure to an already delicate situation. Lambert hasn't improved Ipswich's results but he's a good politician which gets him a lot more leeway from the supporters and usually the owners as well. Hurst was very naive in that respect. As if things aren't bad enough for Ipswich, now Freddie Sears, their top scorer, is out for 12 months with a knee injury.

He was pretty good at Wycombe tbf, and imo at least did a solid job at Villa. His career hasn't gone anywhere since then though. A short stint here which basically just got him back into the spotlight, an average tenure at Wolves followed by really poor spells at Stoke and Ipswich. He now has little choice but to stay at Ipswich (who seem happy to keep him for the foreseeable future) and try to get them promoted from League 1. It won't be as easy as it was for Mowbray though, as Ipswich don't have a Danny Graham, an Elliott Bennett, a Charlie Mulgrew, a Darragh Lenihan or a Corry Evans to hold on to. They have a much worse playing squad than we had when we went down, and Marcus Evans hasn't invested in a long time, so it could be a tough slog for Ipswich next season. I can see them being similar to Rotherham and ending up in the playoffs.

It's clear from his quotes about being frustrated about the summer budget when he left that he was expecting more assurances than he ended up getting. I think he outright said that, and it seemed tied into selling Rhodes as that was done with great urgency in January when previous managers had failed to do so. As with everything Venky's related it's all smoke-and-mirrors and it'll probably be years before we know the real truth behind the Bowyer sacking, Lambert appointment/resignation, Coyle arrival era of 2015-2016. Some strange stuff going on there regardless.

No argument from me. My main concern as an Ipswich fan right now would be the new signings, which seem absolutely pointless. Their squad when Lambert arrived was nowhere near the required standard, and multiple signings later it's still nowhere near. If you're going to buy Alan Judge at least play him in his correct position, otherwise why not buy a wide midfielder or a winger? Some strange decisions going on there. Will Keane is like a shit version of Andy Carroll, ponytail and all.

In fairness, the owners (or their adviser(s)) did appear to lie to Lambert about the kind of funds he'd have available. Whether that makes him leaving right or wrong is open to debate, but if you don't trust your bosses and they've massively lied to you within months or taking the job (and you put a get out clause in your contract assumedly because you weren't 100% sure if they could be trusted) then it's hard to be too critical on him for walking away. Stoke's squad was really poor and I think their performance this season in the Championship shows a lot of those players were never very good to begin with. Rowett and now Jones haven't been able to halt their slide either. He was very lucky to get that job but they needed a proper firefighter like Allardyce to have any hope of staying in the PL. If he quits Ipswich then yes, I'd think he's done for a while at any decent level. He has improved their general play (they actually played quite well against Norwich in spells) but he hasn't been able to cut out their defensive mistakes and his short term signings all look well short of the standard needed to get Ipswich the points they need, which begs the question of why they were signed in the first place. Judge is decent but being played on the wing. Quaner and Keane no better than what Ipswich already had. Same for the likes of Bree. Just desperation signings with no real purpose. At least we got a couple of decent players in Graham and Bennett. Ipswich might as well have signed nobody at all.

If Tony actually plays him up front for a few matches he might get a couple. If he's continually played as an inside forward then I'll be surprised if he scores any.

PS4 is definitely worth it. It's a great system with a ton of amazing games, and you can pick one up for a very reasonable price these days. Still probably a couple of years until the PS5 comes out, and new systems nowadays always take a year or two before they have enough games worth buying. A lot of the time the games are still better when released for the older system as the developers know the architecture of the previous system far better than the newer one. Also if you sign up for PS Plus you get a bunch of games free every month which is a pretty sweet deal. Most of them are pretty old but I've got games like Destiny 2 and Gravity Rush free from PS Plus, so, it's still really good. That said, I'd still keep the XB1. The backwards compatibility on that thing is awesome, so many great XBOX and XBOX 360 games to go back to. It's the one area it absolutely destroys the PS4 on. That said I've heard the PS5 will be fully backwards compatible with the PS4 and possibly PS3 too, but as aforementioned you'll probably be waiting a couple of years for that. As for recommended games, I would say Persona 5 but it isn't on XB1 so that's a no go unless you get a PS4. Most of the other new games I get these days are Oculus or PSVR, so I'm not much help in that regard!

Ipswich have no cutting edge and mistakes across the entire back line. A recipe for disaster. They are going to need a lot of work done to bounce straight back up next season.

Project signings are fine as long as they aren't brought in at the expense of first team improvement. Rothwell, Davenport and Chapman are all pretty negligible as far as fees and presumably wages are concerned so fine, low risk, potentially high reward. Brereton is unfortunately not in that category and it's concerning that the lad isn't even getting time in the u23's, let alone out on loan anywhere. What is being achieved by letting him sit on the bench and get 20 minutes here and there?

The only season we've been truly competitive (outside of last season) is Bowyer's first season where we only missed out on the playoffs by a point or two. We basically choked at the end of the season and that was that. We all remember that draw with Yeovil. The next season we were finished by February, and after that things slowly got worse until the inevitable relegation.

A team pushing for playoff contention doesn't get beaten 5-2 by a team below them in the table, then in the very next match limply lose at home to a rival. Where was the reaction to last week's embarrassment? Where's the ambition or the pride? How many of these players were really stung by last week's result? Judging by today's performance very few if any of them.

I dunno, that was the season we finished 9th wasn't it? We underperformed so badly that season that the cup run just seemed to make a mockery of our inconsistent league form and suggested our players weren't giving their all in the lesser matches. This season I feel like we're overachieving given the lack of talent across the squad and the manager's limitations both tactically and in terms of team selection.

The problem with that mindset is that you end up keeping everybody unhappy. No player in decent form wants to lose their place for no good reason, especially to a player who has been in poor form. That's a strange deduction from whoever that commentator was, as "solid" is not a word that comes to mind when it comes to Williams playing left back (or at all, really).

Was Bell injured/unwell? Hard to fathom the reason behind bringing Williams back into the team otherwise. He's consistently proven himself to be one of our worst players over the campaign.

Based on our GD alone we're basically where we should be now. Once Preston overtake us it'll be a case of where we finish in the bottom half. I think our season is more or less over at this point, so hopefully we move onto trying out some more interesting selections and formations.

I would have preferred seeing Bennett in for Evans and Nyambe at RB, but let's see how it goes.