We looked at the stats to work out why Liam Delap’s supporting cast may doom Ipswich Town to relegation

For some time, it looked like Ipswich Town were the only freshly-promoted side who might have the chops to survive in the top flight – now, following a 3-2 defeat to Manchester United, they are five points adrift of Wolves and haven’t won a game in the league since 2024. It all looks rather bleak.

Even with United in generous mood, giving up a gift of an opening goal and going down to ten men after Patrick Dorgu’s studs-up challenge on a slick surface produced a red card, they failed to find a way to win. In any normal year, there would be little shame in losing at Old Trafford by the odd goal, but with Ruben Amorim’s side on flaky form and reduced in strength by injuries even before Dorgu was sent off, this was a gilded opportunity. There won’t be very many more, and Ipswich’s margin for error is now wafer-thin. But why has a once-promising season seemingly collapsed?

A lack of service to Liam Delap is killing Ipswich up front

Ipswich have at least one player who has drawn endless praise this season – striker Liam Delap, a summer signing whose 10 league goals represent 61.5% of their entire attacking output. Only Leicester City and Southampton have scored fewer in total, and perhaps no team is quite so reliant on one single player to hit the back of the net.

Delap has endured a couple of dry runs this season. Between November and February, he went on a run of 11 matches in which he failed to score from open play, with a couple of penalties his only contributions – but scratching the surface of the stats suggest that the former Manchester City forward wasn’t to blame.

Following a bad individual outing in the 1-1 draw against United at Portman Road, during which Delap spurned a couple of extremely good opportunities, he was given the grand sum total of just 1.4 expected goals’ worth of chances from open play in the next 10 games. In no fewer than four of those games, he didn’t have a single shooting opportunity.

Perhaps he should have scored at some point across that run, but he’s still scoring more than expected – those 10 Premier League goals have come from a total of just 7.9xG. Given the extent to which Ipswich lean on Delap to score their goals, giving him such thin service over the course of the season has to represent a significant failure as a team. Little more could be asked of Delap, who is already being linked with a summer move to Spurs or Chelsea. Much more can be asked of his supporting cast.

Jack Clarke, a revelation for Sunderland in the second tier, has struggled to make his mark on the top flight and has created just 3.18 shooting chances for his team-mates per 90 minutes, a poor mark for a winger and considerably fewer than he managed last year at the Stadium of Light. Omari Hutchinson has flashed his class in patches but has been deeply inconsistent. Wes Burns, who will now miss the rest of the season with a torn ACL, looked much like an EFL player before injury robbed him of the chance to contribute down the home straight.

Then there’s Sammie Szmodics, whose has been a significant disappointment since scoring the opening goal at the Etihad shortly after joining from Blackburn Rovers. McKenna has insisted on using him as a ‘true’ number ten, asking him to play against type – at Ewood Park, he was a predatory false nine and proved to be a superb goalscorer, but instead of playing him in such a way that he gets into the box and on the end of passes, he’s asked to provide them. It’s felt a little bit like getting Slash to join your band and asking him to play the keyboard.

All told, Ipswich have created 25.2xG’s worth of chances, fewer than anyone except for Leicester and comfortably short of the creative marks set by teams like Wolves, who have racked up 30.5xG. They have had the most shots on goal of any of the newly-promoted teams, but still far fewer than anyone outside of the relegation zone. Ipswich are a team which a legitimately dangerous forward and far too few ways to get the ball to him, and McKenna appears unable to find a way to change tack and create the chances Delap desperately needs.

Defensive woes underline a difficult challenge

Of course, there are issues elsewhere, too. Since the turn of the year, Ipswich have shipped 14 goals in eight games, more than any other side apart from Southampton, whose own defence has dissolved into insignificance in recent matches.

Against United, it was set pieces that proved to be the problem, with all three of the home team’s goals coming from dead balls, but Ipswich had only conceded three goals from free-kicks and corners prior to Wednesday's game and the real issue has been a central defence that lacks the quality to compete against Premier League attacks, paired with a midfield which neither controls possession sufficiently well nor provides enough protection.

Ipswich have, on average, had just 40.8% possession over the course of the season, with only Everton and Nottingham Forest seeing less of the ball – for those two teams, that’s a part of a direct, counter-attacking plan, but for Ipswich it’s a bug and not a feature.

Players like Jens Cajuste and Sam Morsy, the scourge of plenty of Championship sides but a step off the pace in the Premier League, simply don’t complete enough simple passes nor force enough turnovers to win the ball back once it’s been lost. Kalvin Phillips, perhaps predictably, looks like a shadow of the player that once dominated the Croatian midfield for England at international level.

Similar issues have blunted the effectiveness of Leif Davis at left-back and most of the players who have tried their hand on the right, a position which has been something of a thorn in McKenna’s side with a number of players deployed there without impressing. Davis, in particular, has found the step up to the top division challenging – he supplied 32 assists in two years as Ipswich marched from League One to the Premier League but has provided just two this year and with an extremely low pass completion rate of 71.9% he has also failed to offer control of the ball down the left flank. That lack of creativity in the final third stems, in part, from a lack of support from further back.

The good news for Ipswich is that if they do go down, they have a squad brimming with proven Championship players and should be in good shape to come back up and have another bite of the cherry. Delap will inevitably leave, but players like Jacob Greaves, Jaden Philogene, Clarke and Szmodics – who should perhaps fill Delap’s shoes once the striker departs – should shine back in the second tier.

Not that Ipswich want to go back there. They aren’t dead in the water yet, and still have 11 games in which to save themselves, including a must-win match against Wolves (who they beat at Molineux) in early April – but they need to start winning, and to do that they need to start controlling possession for longer periods and to start creating more chances for Delap, or find ways to get more of those around him into dangerous areas. If McKenna, a highly-rated coach for a reason, can figure that out, then all is not yet lost, but they need a new plan, and they need it now.