Liam Delap's Return to Portman Road: A Night of Missed Chances
Liam Delap’s return to Portman Road was supposed to be a reminder of what he once was. Instead, it underlined exactly what he is searching for.
Back on the ground where 12 goals in an Ipswich shirt earned him a big-money move to Chelsea, the striker walked off with his head down, his Nottingham Forest team held to a 1-1 draw after dominating almost every meaningful part of the evening except the scoreline.
The chance to change the story came 16 minutes from time. Abdoul Ouattara sliced a clearance straight onto Delap’s forehead, the ball hanging perfectly for the kind of header he buried for fun in Suffolk last season. This time, he sent it over. Moments later, he drove a 30-yard effort just wide. Portman Road exhaled; Forest groaned. Again.
Forest set the tone
Oliver Glasner had backed Delap from the start, keeping faith despite costly misses at Crystal Palace. The away side repaid their manager’s aggression in the opening exchanges, snapping into challenges and playing with the intensity of a team that had no interest in their position, second from bottom, on the Premier League table.
Inside six minutes, they should have led. Jair Cunha went close, and when fit-again Morgan Gibbs-White slipped Delap in, the finish was wild and wasteful, lashed well wide of Christian Walton’s goal.
The warning did not go unheeded for long. Forest’s opener on 13 minutes was straight from the Glasner playbook – vertical, ruthless, wing-backs front and centre.
Delap did the dirty work first, wrestling with Issa Diop and holding the ball up. Gibbs-White darted in ahead of Dara O’Shea, nicked possession, and slid a clever pass into Daniel Muñoz. The right wing-back looked up and picked out his opposite number, Neco Williams, who arrived unmarked to volley right-footed past Walton. A sweeping move, beautifully executed, and fully in tune with Glasner’s vision.
Ipswich tried to respond through Julio Enciso, who curled a free-kick over, but the pattern was set. Forest controlled territory and tempo. Gibbs-White shot off target, then thought he had scored when he beat Walton, only for Leif Davis to sprint back and hook the ball off the line with a superb clearance.
Forest looked comfortable. Too comfortable, as it turned out.
A gift Ipswich didn’t refuse
With four minutes left in the half, Nikola Milenkovic undid all of that control with a moment he will replay for days.
O’Shea launched a hopeful ball forward. Milenkovic cushioned it well enough, but his back-pass to Matz Sels was horribly underhit. Enciso smelled panic, darted between defender and goalkeeper, and rolled his finish into the bottom corner. One loose touch, one weak pass, and Ipswich were level without having had to build a meaningful attack.
Portman Road came alive. Glasner, who had watched his side dominate, now had to wrestle with the fact that his centre-back had handed Gary O’Neil’s team a route back into a match that had been slipping away from them.
VAR, controversy and missed chances
Any sense that Ipswich might ride that gift to seize control vanished almost immediately after the restart. Forest came out snarling again – and within two minutes, the game had its flashpoint.
James McAtee burst through, only to be hauled down by Diop in a challenge that looked, at full speed and on replay, like a red card waiting to be shown. Referee Thomas Bramall initially failed to even give a foul. VAR intervened, sent him to the monitor, and after review he produced only a yellow.
Forest players surrounded the official, incredulous. Glasner raged on the touchline. Ipswich breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The visitors could not turn the resulting free-kick into punishment on the scoreboard, but the pressure kept building. Around the hour, a Williams effort was blocked, Murillo spun smartly in the box and forced a save, and the pattern of the first half re-emerged: Forest probing, Ipswich clinging on.
Murillo then went close again, followed swiftly by Dan Ndoye, whose effort required another desperate intervention from Davis near his own goal. Each time Forest surged, Ipswich found a body, a boot, a block.
And then came Delap’s moment, the one that would have tied his story neatly – the returning hero, scoring in front of a crowd that once sang his name. Ouattara’s miscued clearance dropped invitingly. Delap rose, alone, and powered his header over. When his long-range strike skimmed past the post soon after, it felt less like bad luck and more like a striker trapped in his own head.
Forest kept pushing, but the net would not ripple again.
A point that feels like a defeat
On paper, a 1-1 draw away from home, extending a run of just one league win in eight under Glasner, is another small step, another point. On the pitch, this was something else entirely: a night when Forest imposed their style, created the better chances, and left with nothing like the reward their performance deserved.
Williams’ sharp finish, Muñoz’s energy, Gibbs-White’s invention, Murillo’s threat from the back – all of it pointed to a side far better than their league position suggests. Yet the table does not care about aesthetics, only about results, and those still refuse to follow.
For Ipswich and O’Neil, this was a salvage job. They were second best for long spells, but Enciso’s alertness and Davis’ defensive heroics turned Milenkovic’s blunder into a valuable point and denied Forest the cathartic away win they craved.
Delap walked away from Portman Road with applause from some familiar faces and no goal to show for it. Forest walked away with a draw that felt like a missed opportunity. At some point, the performances will have to turn into wins – or nights like this will start to feel less like progress and more like a warning.
