These two sides have returned to the Championship after contrasting seasons in different divisions, but both are fancied to perform strongly this term.<\/p>\n
Blues romped out of League One with a record 111 points while the Tractor Boys came unstuck in their Premier League campaign as they managed only four wins on their way to relegation.<\/p>\n
Birmingham’s ambitious American owners do not want to hang around in the second tier judging by some of their exciting summer acquisitions, of whom four started here.<\/p>\n
The Knighthead Group, led by Tom Wagner, have big plans – although minority investor Tom Brady could not be here as the NFL megastar is in New England awaiting the unveiling of his own statue at the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.<\/p>\n
For Ipswich, 10 of their starters were involved last season and many were stand-out performers in this division in the previous campaign for both themselves and other clubs.<\/p>\n
Chris Davies’ team may be ‘newcomers’, but they did not look out of place at all. They played with confidence, aggression and a clearly defined style as they showed why they have not lost a home league game since April 2024.<\/p>\n
They came out on top in all the key metrics except one, with Hirst’s spot-kick the only shot on target the visitors managed all game.<\/p>\n
New additions like centre-half Phil Neumann and ex-Celtic star Furuhashi immediately looked at home and Ipswich will know they will not have too many harder away tests than this all season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These two sides have returned to the Championship after contrasting seasons in different divisions, but both are fancied…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7820],"tags":[855,748,393,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-328935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-birmingham","8":"tag-birmingham","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114995394219563674","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}