Ipswich Town column: Kieran McKenna’s tactics and recruitment both come into question after 3-0 defeat to Charlton Athletic at Portman Road

There were many dark days and low moments on the way to relegation last season, but Tuesday night’s 3-0 defeat at home to Charlton tops all of those for me.

Truthfully, I’m still a little shell-shocked and can’t believe that’s just happened. Once again I’m questioning where on earth the leadership is in this group? Who is grabbing that game by the scruff of its neck? And do we have anybody we can trust when the going gets tough? I’m not sure we do currently.

You spend £175m, yet we’re all sat here dreaming about a team we had that was worth £3m in League One.

I get we need to move on. I get that we can’t hang on to the past forever, but I will never understand how and why we let such key and influential leaders at this football club go in one single summer – and replace them with quite frankly, players who don’t look like they want to be here.

I really don’t know where we go from here and I’m interested to see how things go against West Brom on Saturday.

This was a season where we were tipped to win the league. This was a season that we were expected to run away with it. Currently, we look a million miles off that – both quality wise but also as a team.

I’m not sure how this ends up. I’m not on the bus of wanting Kieran McKenna to lose his job and I think it will take a lot more for me to ever get to that stage, but he deserves questioning.

We’ve played the same way and the same style for four seasons. It obviously worked incredibly the first two and even for a small part of the last, but this whole calendar has been awful and teams know how to deal with us now. I’m not sure we can afford to keep persisting with it, on current results but also performances.

On to Saturday - we’ll be there and we’ll keep on backing. But 10 games in, this really looks a long way off even being half as successful as our last season in this division.