It’s a measure of how Blues have progressed and their aspiration that Ipswich Town were grateful to escape with a point in the season opener.
Most sages have Ipswich down among the Championship title favourites.
Yet Blues made them look anything but and were it not for a highly controversial award of a penalty in the fifth minute of added-time, Ipswich would have been sent back down the A14 with their tractors between their legs.
Chris Davies said he was ‘intrigued’ to see how Blues would fare. How they would make the adjustment into the division above after sweeping all aside them in League One. How they would cope with the occasion, under the lights live on Sky Sports, kicking-off the Championship season. And against a hotly-fancied side, who put together back-to-back promotions and have just come out of the top-flight.
Sifting through the aftermath of a pulsating night, he will have been pretty pleased.
It’s no exaggeration to state that, right now, Ipswich have more issues to address than Blues do.
Ipswich paid Blues a big compliment in the first-half.
They turned Blues round at kick-off so they were attacking the Tilton Road End. And Ipswich were akin to plenty of the teams we saw last season in League One – they slowed the game right down, were niggly and tried to take the pumped-up crowd out of the occasion.
For a team that is normally ball-dominate and want to dictate, it was Blues in that role.
Blues carried on in the style they left off in 2024/25. We saw the intense press, the right-back going high (and what a debut from Bright Osayi-Samuel), the fulcrum of Paik and Tomoki Iwata directing operations. The big Austrian brick wall at the back, now with a big German brick wall alongside. The possession football.
It was a defiant message to the Championship: ‘This is the new Birmingham, this is how we play, we’re not changing – come and take us on’.
By contrast, it looked as if Ipswich were struggling to understand what their identity is right now.
Davies sprang a surprise by starting Kyogo Furuhashi. He explained afterwards that it was in part due to Tommy Doyle suffering illness during the week.
The Japanese was a delight. So sharp and quick, a real pest. His alertness to get in behind when Osayi-Samuel headed forward was instrumental in Jay Stansfield’s well-taken goal; Kyogo’s loft over Alex Palmer coming back off the upright into his path.
Another loft – in the first-half, an instinctive smart, finish – arguably should have stood. The bump of Jacob Greaves as Kyogo got position after the centre-half misjudged a bouncing ball was relatively innocuous , but was deemed a foul.
Alas, you didn’t know what you were going to get with the referee, Andrew Kitchen, from one minute to the next.
Deep into added-time, after Ipswich had wrestled their way back into matters, it was with strange gusto and one assumes laser-focus sight that he awarded the penalty for handball, against Lyndon Dykes.
Dykes jumped with his arms raised as he levered himself and he then turned his head to face Greaves, who nodded the ball down. It rolled along Dykes bent arm, at point blank range, flicking off his fingertips. Hardly a deliberate infringement and it would have been an interesting VAR check.
It was tough on Blues as George Hirst stuck away the spot-kick with what was Ipswich’s only shot on target.
The aftermath was unseemly and whilst the actions of the irate spectator who went for Conor Chaplin cannot be condoned, I’m not sure what people sometimes expect.
Chaplin lathering the loose ball from the penalty with venomous intent into the crowd was hardly going to earn him a year’s supply of two-pint pitchers in the Fan Park, was it?
Christoph Klarer’s reaction was to charge at Chaplin and get him in a bear hug, resulting in the fracas by the advertising hoardings. That was telling.
Here you had the captain defending not so much his teammates, but the fans. The club. It was as if he was warning ‘You don’t do that to our supporters, pal’. When have you seen anything like that before?
Players and fans are fully invested in what’s happening at Blues. The bear pit atmosphere at St. Andrew’s is part of what makes Blues (channelled correctly) and each is feeding off the other.
It was a shame that Blues ran out of steam a little and couldn’t see it through to post a statement victory. In fairness, though, it looked as if they would – they came the penalty. Ipswich’s changes injected more life into them.
But there was a lot of encouragement to take from the game, with tweaks still to be made and players still to come – Mavin Ducksch, who is a few weeks from full fitness, was introduced to the crowd before kick-off.
It was clear from the night that Blues are no longer an irrelevance, no longer a soft or an easy touch, as we became used to in the last several Championship seasons. And they can play.
Davies commented: “I was intrigued to see how we would cope against this team. There was a little bit of trepidation maybe with some of the players about how would we do back in the Championship and Ipswich are obviously a really strong side at this level. One of the favourites.
“That’s why I am able to see past the penalty quite quickly because of the context of this whole game, the first game back at this level again – there were just a lot of positives there, a lot to build on.
“In this league there are too many good teams for you to just try to grind it out all the time. You have got to play well. You have got play well with the ball, be good defensively, press a lot.
“If we take this as an individual game against Ipswich and what they are good at, we stopped them doing it; and then what we are good at, we showed what we can do. That really does bode well.”
Davies rewound to 12 months ago, and Blues opener in the third tier against Reading.
“A year ago we drew 1-1, also at home. I remember that day; there was so much about the performance that I didn’t like. It was not what I wanted us to be like. We took time to get doing (in the season).
“A year on obviously we have a lot of the same players with us, and that was a lot more of what we want to be (v Ipswich). It’s that (case of) performing consistently and the results will follow. It’s focusing on how we play.”
