Nobody left early. Nobody stopped singing. Nobody grizzled or grumbled or booed or barracked. Ipswich Town have spent long enough out of the Premier League’s walled garden not to take its pleasures for granted, even if those pleasures occasionally include getting spanked 6-0 by the quadruple champions. Equally, this is a result for which the rest of the division will not necessarily thank them.
Since Sammie Szmodics sensationally squeezed them ahead at the Etihad Stadium in August, Ipswich have now given up 10 unanswered goals to Manchester City in 173 minutes of football. And if that was partly stage fright, here they were more complicit: a collapse up there with their worst performances of the season, perhaps even playing an edgy City back into some kind of form.
