Ipswich town coach loses his spouse .

 

SAD NEWS: Ipswich Town coach loses his spouse following.

Ieran McKenna smiles as he recalls the fascination that began early and never let up. “I was the eight-year-old sitting up watching a League Two game in the spare room while the rest of the family had the TV on elsewhere,” he recalls of his time growing up in County Fermanagh, soaking up every detail. “I know so many children are passionate about the game but I was the one watching every single second of football, day and night.”

Little has changed in over three decades, though McKenna may have fewer chances to focus on the lower divisions now. He has taken Ipswich out of the doldrums, achieving promotion from League One in his first full season.

They scored 101 goals, lost only four games and prospered with a sophisticated, dominant brand of football virtually alien to the third tier. More experienced heads had failed to reignite Ipswich but McKenna, who turns 37 on Sunday, arrived with a plan in December 2021 and executed it perfectly. It is hard to think of a more exciting young manager working in the country.

“When you have a club of this size and history, the only one in a big county, there’s massive potential,” he says, sitting in his office at the Suffolk club’s training ground. “We’ve had really powerful momentum, incredible support, and it’s a great place to be. We know there’s a lot of hard work to do but it’s nice to be in this position and there’s a real chance to push onwards and upwards.”

Ipswich are backed by Gamechanger 20, which makes little secret of its ambitions to restore the club’s glorious past. The US-led consortium outwardly took a risk when appointing McKenna, a rising star as first-team coach at Manchester United who had yet to go it alone, but were rewarded by a show of sheer self-belief.

McKenna’s plan was to take Ipswich up by playing from the back, trusting in their technical and structural superiority over opponents who usually wielded blunter instruments. It meant paying little heed to doubters and convincing sceptics. “I had a lot of discussions with people in football along the lines of: ‘That’s going to be very difficult,’ or: ‘I’m not sure if it’ll be possible,’” he says.

“I also had them with one or two of the players who were here last season, saying they thought it would be difficult getting out of League One playing a brave brand of football where you open the pitch up, play with the ball on the floor, try to make sure it stays in play, build from the back and look to open space up.

“There was certainly a narrative that it was not the recipe to get out of the division. It took a lot of conviction in our beliefs, conviction from the club to back us, conviction from the players to buy into it. For me, that makes the achievement all the more satisfying because it’s not been easy.”

McKenna took on a squad that mixed well-paid signings with those who had been around longer and seen various approaches fail. But he carried them with him, persuading them to “not over-obsess about results” and trust dedication to their approach would reap due rewards.

They overwhelmed their opposition on most metrics and, in the final third of the season, reached the peak that took them up with the champions, Plymouth: Ipswich won 13 and drew two of their last 15 games, scoring 45 and conceding four. Under McKenna they have never let in a goal through errors passing out from defence. “That’s something we did take pride in,” he says.

As that football-obsessed child, McKenna saw his family create an award-winning project of their own. His father had been a car mechanic in London and his mother a nurse; they decided to buy the Manor House Country hotel, located by Lough Erne to the north of Enniskillen, and built up a venue that is consistently named among Ireland’s best. “Seeing the work they’ve put in, the hours, the way they managed people, the passion they put into it, definitely influenced me,” he says.

“My dad pretty much lived in the hotel in the way some might say I live at this football club. I’d see my grandad come over from London on his holidays and within a day he’d be up a scaffold painting the top of the hotel or fixing tiles on the roof. It was a life’s work from the whole family.”

Now football is his. McKenna, a gifted player as well as a diligent student, left home at 16 to join Spurs’ academy and was close to the first team when a hip injury hit. It forced him to retire in 2009, when he was 22, but perhaps his course was already set.