Why Ipswich Town look better equipped for Premier League survival

If there was one thing that summed up Ipswich Town 's Championship promotion in the 2023/24 season, it was late goals. Jeremy Sarmiento only spent a season on loan at Portman Road and yet he achieved cult hero status when he scored a 97th-minute toe poke to turn 2-1 defeat against Southampton to a 3-2 win.

Games against Birmingham, Bristol City and Blackburn were all decided in the dying embers during the promotion run-in. It gave Ipswich an aura of invincibility and fans of their promotion rivals a sense of inevitability.

The Suffolk club would win 32 points from losing positions, a league high. That desire, and fortune, was what powered a League One club to the Premier League against opposition with far deeper pockets and had everyone believing there was a higher power backing their promotion push.

That ability to be down but not out did an almost perfect 180 once the club was back in the Premier League. In their first top-flight campaign in 20 years, Ipswich led 15 games and won just four; only Southampton had a worse record.

History says 22 points and a 19th-place finish, context would show that especially in the first half of the season, Ipswich were competitive in a lot of games and lost it by small margins. So when Ipswich won promotion back to the Premier League last season, that was the big question facing the fans.

Ipswich have not survived a Premier League season since 2001 so can this team turn well-fought competitions into wins? The answer after six games is yes.

Ipswich's 2-1 victory against Fulham, in which they were trailing as late as the 87th minute, was a hark back to that promotion-winning season. A stunning effort from Abdoul Ouattara breached the Fulham defence and Ipswich fans were as confident of a winner as Fulham fans were of losing.

Of Ipswich's three wins this season, two have come when the club were trailing. Only Arsenal and Crystal Palace haveclawed back as many points as Ipswich from losing points so far this season.

And the result against Fulham is exactly the kind that would not have gone Ipswich's way two seasons ago. But getting to that situation was not luck.