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3 hours ago
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When the tears have dried, the adage will ring true for Ipswich and Kieran McKenna. They will smile because it happened and reflect that, despite the hurt, sometimes it is best to part while the love still burns. Perhaps they will also marvel at the unlikely magic football occasionally sprinkles. It is an industry in which people and places are thrown together, coming and going, sticking or not. When McKenna arrived in Suffolk four and a half years ago he could have been another hired gun; instead he transformed a community’s relationship with its club and left a legacy that should span generations.
All parties caught lightning in a bottle during a tenure that has ended after Ipswich’s third promotion in four seasons. McKenna will not lead them into another Premier League campaign and, hearing his voice crack repeatedly during an intensely emotional farewell address to the fanbase, anyone could have been forgiven for wondering why. Ipswich are in a better position to attempt survival than in 2024-25, when they had returned to the top in stunning fashion after 22 years away. His stock remains sky high among supporters and those who employed him. Then there is the matter of a contract that put him among the top flight’s better-paid managers.
In the end those considerations fell behind something simpler. McKenna was honest enough to admit he wanted a break and it is refreshing, in an era when managers’ careers begin ever earlier, to see a 40-year-old coach embrace the need to prioritise a young family. For McKenna they have always come ahead of any thirst for celebrity and it is instructive to look back at an interview he gave to the Guardian in 2023, shortly after he had taken Ipswich up from League One.
“I don’t have any interest in fame or external validation,” he said, warming to the theme during a long conversation in his office at the training ground. “My family, my close friends, my coaching staff, those are the important things and that won’t change. When you come home from getting promoted against Exeter and your daughter wants donkey rides around the living room within two minutes, and then you’re up at 6am watching cartoons, it keeps you grounded. You know where your reality is.”
It was a telling glimpse into the psyche of a man who was already on the watch lists of top clubs around Europe. McKenna had several opportunities to leave Ipswich in the subsequent 12 months, both before and straight after the first ascent to the Premier League. Some of those offers brought serious pause for thought but McKenna stayed put. Ipswich had become more than a staging post: it brought a stable but thrustingly ambitious working environment and a quiet lifestyle that a man raised in rural Fermanagh had immediately tuned into.
The adulation of the club’s support, roused from years of apathy by a diet of dazzling football, was tangible but never smothering. In Ipswich, you can wear hero status while simultaneously being yourself. Like Bobby Robson and Alf Ramsey before him, McKenna and his family lived near the town centre: normal people with no requirement for an ivory tower. The fact that the face of Ipswich’s success was so visible and woven into the community’s fabric was fundamental to his popularity.
He departs with that affection firmly intact. That was not always a guarantee for periods of last season and, for practitioners in hindsight, it is possible to identify moments when McKenna looked relatively drawn or strained. “It’s probably been the hardest one,” he said of their promotion, secured on the final day after the kind of late-season run in which his teams have specialised.
Ipswich had come back down with deep pockets but, their squad shaken up by the consequences of a sharp rise and rapid fall, it took months to forge cohesion in a new-look side. McKenna was tasked with rebuilding a plane in mid-air and, for the first time, was battling raised expectations among Ipswich’s supporters too. On a couple of occasions his frustration at the muted atmosphere around Portman Road, such a vibrant venue during the good times, was obvious.
Eventually McKenna did what great managers do, forging a second winning team in completely different circumstances to the first. History will look on the achievement glowingly. If promotion in 2023-24 had been euphoric, this time the sense was more akin to relief. While many of Ipswich’s players and staff celebrated in a bar on the town’s waterfront after the decisive victory over QPR, McKenna and his coaches reflected more quietly nearby. Perhaps it felt, even then, that the peak had been reached. It may only have taken one more yo-yo between the divisions for the love affair to dull.
That kind of oscillation is what Ipswich must avoid. Time is tight if they are to find the right replacement and sign the core of players with Premier League physicality that they require. It is a difficult spot but nobody would begrudge McKenna his wish. In common with an understated, highly self-possessed, character it has been perfectly pitched. McKenna departs a legend, while safe in the knowledge that the queue for his services will be extensive whenever he chooses to dive back in.
Perhaps, one day, McKenna and Ipswich will cross paths again. Maybe he will re-encounter the youngsters who, brought to Portman Road by parents he had inspired to give their club a second chance, sang his name in the playground and wept when told of his departure. He will move again among longstanding supporters who, for whatever reason, had lost a connection with the town or club before regaining something incalculable. The eyes may moisten again but, for Ipswich, McKenna’s reign rarely provided anything beyond sheer delight.
