If you’re spending at least part of the bank holiday weekend in deepest East Anglia, you’ll find Ipswich Town’s stadium just to the south-west of the town centre. Kick-off is at 3pm on Saturday, as Sky have unaccountably declined to televise this great occasion, as we travel to Suffolk for the first time in four years.

If you could arrive by train it would be impossible to miss Portman Road, as it will be looming in front of you as you take the main exit from the station. So it’s a pity there will be a reduced train service due to yet another strike, with a bit of engineering work thrown in to make things even more difficult if you’re coming from London. And the last train of the day going back on the direct line to Peterborough will leave at 17.58.

The most direct route from the north by car will be to take the A1156 exit from the A14 (signposted Ipswich West and North) then turning right after 2.5 miles onto the town's inner ring road. There have been known to be weekend roadworks on the A14, so you are advised to check @A14C2H on Twitter for the latest situation.

From the south you will approach on the A12 and you should take the A1214 on the edge of Ipswich and keep straight on when this road crosses the ring road and becomes Handford Road. There have been reports of away fans' cars being damaged around the town, so you shouldn't leave anything in your cars that identifies them as coming from Leeds, including garage stickers.

If you get there early enough the best bet for parking will be the large car park in Portman Road itself, which on matchdays is only accessible from the top end (Handford Road.) Other options are to use the car parks on the railway station side of the ground. At the railway station itself there is a multi-storey which will cost you £2.70, and nearby on West End street is a large open-air car park, which is £4 for four hours.

The main away supporters’ pub is now the Station Hotel near the ground, which as the name suggests is just opposite the railway station. It usually gets packed out when we visit, but there is a second bar in the beer garden at the lower level, which boasts an excellent view of the traffic cones that have been thrown into the river. Other pubs in the town, such as the Victoria, the Hare & Hounds and the Swan, are very much home pubs and are best avoided by away fans.

You could try the 'Punch and Judy' though they might turn you away if they realise you're a Leeds fan. This pub is in the 'Cardinal Park' complex in Grafton Street, which is about a 5 minute walk from the ground, and also has a car park and fast food outlets. The best of these is 'Ask Italian', which serves very good pasta & pizza. If you're approaching the ground from the railway station you can find the 'Cardinal Park' complex by turning right at the first set of traffic lights after you've crossed the river.

The best options in the town centre are ‘Lord Nelson’ in Fore Street and the CAMRA-listed ‘Dove Street Inn’ on St Helens Street. There are no takeaways immediately by the stadium, which is mainly surrounded by industrial premises and office blocks, though you will find a couple of burger vans in the car park near our turnstiles. Alcohol is normally available inside Portman Road, at the usual inflated football ground prices, though not at half time.

The club have increased the capacity to 30,311 in the years following the Taylor report, with the re-development of both ends as the former Churchmans and North terraces were replaced with larger stands. The Greene King (South) Stand and the North Stand are similar in appearance and size, with a larger upper tier which overhangs a smaller lower tier, and they dwarf the smaller older stands on each side of the ground.

The last few times we came to Ipswich before they were relegated they gave us the whole of the upper tier of the Cobbold stand, but now we’re back to the normal away allocation of 2,000, which predictably sold out as soon as they went on sale. Leeds didn’t manage to reach a reciprocal agreement with Ipswich on pricing, so they cost £34 for adults, with concessions from £12 to £27.

The Cobbold stand is now the oldest part of the ground, and the facilities within this stand are limited, so if you need some refreshments then it's best to get them before you enter the ground. The narrow corridors can get dangerously crowded at half-time, as this part of the ground was the main stand when it opened in 1971. So it was never designed to cope with away fans who would all stop for an extended refreshment break on the way down and so need to depart for the loos en masse to relieve themselves during the interval.

Also the seats within are rather crammed together, and can be a bit uncomfortable even for those with normal length legs. Or at least they would be cramped if we ever sat down! After the game the police will block off the bottom of Portman Road to segregate the two sets of fans while the Leeds fans go back the coaches in the adjacent car park, which will delay anyone wanting to go back to the railway station.

A sneaky visit to Ipswich’s ‘Those were the days’ forum told me that the last tickets for the home stands sold out within 15 minutes of going on general sale. Apparently they now have 23k season ticket holders now they’re doing well, so after giving 2k to us, that only leaves 5k to go on sale for individual matches to Ipswich fans. The fans on that forum occasionally call Leeds fans ‘deluded’, so I won’t say they must have sold out due to the excitement of playing a big club.

I don't normally bother to repeat the record attendance information that clubs put on their official websites, but in this case I'll make an exception. The record attendance at Portman Road is 38,010 for an FA Cup 6th Round tie on March 8th 1975, against the greatest team of that era, who went on to reach that season's European Cup final. Those were the days indeed!

They might have a go at beating that record one day, and a few years ago there was talk of re-developing the Cobbold Stand at some stage to boost the capacity of the ground to 40,000. But things have been quiet on that front for some time, and more recently the talk has all been about refurbishing what they already have.

Ipswich is always one of the more enjoyable away trips, but it looks like it will be quite a few years before we get a more generous allocation so that more of us can enjoy it.

Some of this stuff came from www.footballgroundguide.com .

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