Plymouth Argyle, Ipswich Town and two bites of the Championship cherry

For those who don’t believe in the sporting concept of mental scarring, 2022-23 has been a smugness-inducing season. Arsenal, who missed out on Big Cup qualification last year after a shattering collapse, were supposed to start this season with a hangover. Instead they Tiggered their way to the top of the Premier League, staying there for almost the entire season, and ultimately what has happened in the last three weeks has got nothing to do with the narrative we’re peddling! An even more impressive – and sustained – display of bouncebackability, mind, has occurred in League One. A year ago this weekend, a wobbling Plymouth Argyle played their last league game at home to MK Dons, knowing a win would almost certainly ensure a playoff place. They lost 5-0.

While seventh was still higher than Plymouth were expected to finish, it was the kind of setback that could ruin a team, especially as their young manager Steven Schumacher was less than six months into his first senior job. Instead, Argyle have seen last season’s overachievement and raised it. With two games of a pretty remarkable season to go, they (95), Ipswich (94) and Sheffield Wednesday (90) have combined for 279 points, but only two of them can go up automatically to the Championship. In the interests of balance and journalistic integrity, we must acknowledge that the sweet smell of success cannot yet be found everywhere in Plymouth. While Football Daily was reading about the team on the local newspaper website, a domineering breaking-news alert informed us that – and we’re not making this up – “Plymouth Morrisons stinks of ‘raw sewage’ and ‘urine’.”

It’s still possible for both Argyle and Ipswich to reach 100 points, which we think would be an EFL first, and