Ipswich Town have a good opportunity to start building some momentum under new manager Paul Cook

Two games in and Paul Cook will know the scale of his task.

An abject defeat to Gillingham at the weekend was followed up on Tuesday night by a well-deserved 1-1 home draw with Lincoln, leaving the new boss with just one point from his opening two games.

Is this the start he was after? Absolutely not. Is it the start us fans thought we would get when many were anticipating a new manager bounce? Again, probably not.

In fact, it is the exact same start Paul Hurst made back in 2018. Thanks, ‘Renegade Statman’ for that happy fact! Here is hoping that this is where the similarities end!

While the start hasn’t been what we wanted, the fact we haven’t lost any ground in the race for the play-offs sums up England’s third tier.

Currently we are sitting seventh, one point and one game in hand on sixth-placed Portsmouth. The league is ‘bonkers’ to coin a Mick McCarthy phrase.

As host of the Talking Town podcast on YouTube and Facebook, I speak to many different fans for our post-match show. All have wonderful opinions but as you can imagine I do hear a wide range of them.

A question I often ask the viewer is: ‘What’s your target for Paul Cook?’

This has been met with varied responses along the lines of ‘no pressure’ to ‘top two’ to more recently ‘if we can scrape into the top six then that would be great’.

Looking at the remaining fixtures, it leaves me feeling not only intrigued but also hopeful that we can kick on under Cook and achieve something more then a ‘scraping of the top six’.

Particularly after that gutsy draw to the surprise third place occupiers, Lincoln, after only a handful of training sessions.

Is it an easy task? No. But as Burton have proved, it’s all about momentum. With three of our next four games against bottom half teams, lay a foundation in March and Easter could be a very exciting time for this football club on and off the pitch.

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