Rivalries make sport better. Always.
And we all know who Ipswich’s biggest rivals are – Norwich City.
Town haven’t had much fun in the East Anglian derby of late and the two teams haven’t played each other since 2019.
But Carrow Road is far from where the Blues’ ‘rivalries’ end. A grudge match doesn’t need to be based solely around location.
There are other factors at play, too. Competition is a big one, as is personality and controversy. One of those things can spark and create a rivalry.
Over the last 25 years or so, Bolton, Sheffield United and West Ham have all been real rivals to Town, each becoming intertwined with the Blues for a number of years at a time for various reasons.
Are Portsmouth becoming a team who could soon be added to that list? It’s maybe a little soon to say that just yet, but the two teams have certainly breathed the same air in recent years and appear to both be serious promotion challengers this season.
Here we’ll take a look at the growth of Town’s rivalry with Portsmouth, with the two teams set to meet at Portman Road tomorrow.
History
This weekend will be the 50th match between the two sides, with Ipswich winning 20 and Portsmouth 16 of the previous 49 games.
Prior to meeting in the third tier, the Fratton Park club knocked Town out of the FA Cup in 2016, winning a replay on the south coast following a draw at Portman Road.
But a sense of rivalry between Ipswich and Portsmouth is something which has developed during the two teams’ time together in League One, over the last three seasons.
They’ve met six times, with Portsmouth winning four of them.
Ipswich’s only success was the 4-0 victory at Fratton Park nearly a year ago, while the return meeting in March ended goalless.
An escalator
Ellis Harrison’s move from Ipswich to Portsmouth in 2019 added a little bit of needle to matches between two big clubs in the early days in League One, with the striker schooling the Blues at Fratton Park in their only meeting of the Covid-shortened 2019/20 campaign.
But things went up a gear or two when Paul Cook was appointed Town boss in 2021, with the new Ipswich manager soon taking his side to Fratton Park, where he would face the team he once guided to promotion from League Two.
His exit in 2017 was controversial as he jumped ship to Wigan just a few weeks after taking Pompey up, meaning there was no love lost between Cook and the supporters who once chanted his name.
Cook’s presence certainly brought Ipswich into the Portsmouth crosshairs.
His return to Fratton Park with Town was played behind-closed-doors due to Covid but some searching questions from Portsmouth journalists in the pre-match press conference opened some old wounds and ramped things up a little.
Portsmouth were victorious that afternoon, but Cook would get his revenge the following October, as Ipswich won 4-0 under the lights at Fratton Park.
“My time at Portsmouth has now passed and they have their own issues, which are for Danny and Nicky Cowley to sort out,” he said prior to that game.
“Going back to Portsmouth is just the next game of the campaign. Does it hold much for me? No, not particularly because I just want to win the game.”
A mad summer
In between Cook’s two Portsmouth visits with Ipswich was a hectic summer which saw the two clubs seemingly battle it out in the transfer market on a weekly basis.
When once every player linked with Ipswich was also mentioned in connection with Sunderland, now Town and Pompey were shopping in the same market.
Ipswich were linked with both Gavin Bazunu and Mahlon Romeo, who eventually joined Portsmouth having not been serious Ipswich targets, while the Blues also tried to steal midfielder Joe Morrell from under the noses of Pompey, only to fail to land the Luton man.
All of those deals were played out fairly publicly.
The same was true of Town’s pursuit of Michael Jacobs, who made it as far as driving through the gates of Ipswich’s Playford Road training ground that summer for a medical, before the Blues ultimately pulled the plug and quickly turned their attention to Kyle Edwards.
Current Pompey boss Danny Cowley has often said he feels that move ‘could have been handled better’.
Social situation and Chequebook FC
One element missing from the previously-mentioned rivalries with Sam Allardyce’s Bolton, Neil Warnock’s Sheffield United and Alan Pardew’s West Ham was the role of social media.
The term ‘Chequebook FC’ was born online as Ipswich and Portsmouth rubbed up against each other in the transfer market, with Portsmouth fans quick to accuse Town, now under American ownership, of ‘trying to buy the league’.
The two fanbases were at it on a near daily basis, in what was a short-lived but fairly ferocious period of online jousting.
Ipswich CEO Mark Ashton has regularly distanced himself and the club from any notion of ‘big spending’, highlighting the fact so many players (and their salaries) were moved on that summer, while decent transfer fees were achieved for the likes of Flynn Downes and Andre Dozzell.
“Paul and I had a chuckle about it the other day after someone showed us,” Ashton said at a fans’ forum at the start of last season, when asked about the ‘Chequebook FC’ nickname.
“People forget that we’ve sold (Andre Dozzell and Flynn Downes) as well as bought and we have moved out one helluva lot of salary because we have a set of salary protocols that we must adhere to. We do that, so we’ve had to move out to move in.
“All we’re going to do is focus on us. Ipswich Town is the priority. Let’s just focus on what we do, let’s control what we can do. It makes me chuckle because if people are talking about us like that, we might be concerning one or two.”
Familiar faces
If Ipswich and Portsmouth were orbiting each other in the 2021 transfer market, they broke into each other’s atmospheres in 2022.
As the clock struck 11pm on July 15, Marcus Harness swapped Fratton Park for Portman Road as Joe Pigott went the other way on loan. Entirely separate deals but one big event which brought these two clubs even closer together.
Town had paid good money, around £600,000, for one of Portsmouth’s best players, while Pigott headed to a promotion rival with a real point to prove.
The two teams’ seasons would now be linked.
Harness has started well at Town, netting five goals which should really have been six, with a match-winner against Barnsley wrongly ruled out in August. Portsmouth fans will know exactly what to expect from him this weekend, while Pigott will of course be in the stands against his parent club.
Then there’s Conor Chaplin, the boyhood Pompey fan who still follows the club now, but has become central to Kieran McKenna’s Ipswich.
He received a standing ovation at Fratton Park, when substituted after scoring in that 4-0 victory last season, having opted not to celebrate his goal against the side he made more than 100 appearances for as a mark of respect.
Portsmouth have a real place in Chaplin’s heart but there’s no doubting the result he’ll be after this weekend.
The boss
Cowley and Ipswich have links of their own, with the Essex-born boss coming from a family containing a fair few Town fans and dumping the Blues out of the FA Cup with then non-league Lincoln in 2017.
There was a time when you sensed he could even have taken the job at Ipswich himself and, whenever he has been back to Portman Road, you could always see he appreciates the surroundings he found himself in.
Danny and his brother Nicky can be abrasive characters on the touchline, as many in the game have pointed out, and there was a flashpoint last season when the Pompey boss clashed with former Town loanee Dominic Thompson over a throw-in. Cowley said Kieran McKenna apologised to him for the incident, which had brought a significant spark to a game which finished 0-0.
Cowley and McKenna are very different in their touchline manner, so it will be interesting to see what happens when they meet for a second time this weekend.
There’s certainly a feeling that Cowley could become something of a pantomime figure, just as Allardyce, Warnock and Pardew were before him.
Competition time
The above is all well and good, but it’s competition on the pitch that cements these rivalries.
And there’s every feeling that both Ipswich and Portsmouth will be right up there come the end of the season.
What a real rivalry needs, though, is those big games and big moments which turns and decide seasons. Victory for either side in front of a crowd of more than 28,000 this weekend would be a real start.
Maybe this can be the classic game a real rivalry needs.
If the two teams found themselves in a nip-and-tuck promotion race, that would take the competition between the two to the next level.
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