Ipswich Town's relegation from the Premier League in 2024/25 with just 22 points was a significant setback for the club. Experienced manager Tony Pulis says Ipswich Town boss Kieran McKenna must take a more pragmatic approach to Premier League survival. The Blues were relegated with just 22 points in 2024/25, having risen rapidly to the top flight via back-to-back promotions following 22 years away. Now, after instantly bouncing back from the Championship, both McKenna and chairman Mark Ashton have insisted that the club is in a much better position to take on some of the world's best this time around. Pulis is best known for getting a direct and combative Stoke side consistently upsetting the applecart in the Premier League during the 2000s and 2010s. Speaking to Boyle Sports, who offer the latest football odds, he said: 'This is the real test now for Ipswich Town. Kieran McKenna has achieved promotions with big budgets for the levels. Now he has to find a way to manage his team to get results when the odds are against you, not for you. He had a year to actually have a look and get a feel for what it’s like to be a Premier League team and to go to different places, so he’s got that experience now. For me, it’s a big year for him. It’s a really, really big year. The pressure will be on him. People say if you come up from the Championship you come up and go straight back down, but teams have only gone straight back down because I don’t think those clubs have understood what they needed to do to stay in the Premier League. If you look at Leeds United, they had a poor start but then all of a sudden Daniel Farke changed what he was doing (switching to a 3-5-2 system) and it came together. At Sunderland, they had a good footballing side in the Championship but they went out and added some real pace and power to their team. What people have got to realise is that in the Premier League you’re playing football against some of the best teams in the world but you’re also up against some of the very top athletes in the world too. I remember at Stoke City, the first year we played Arsenal at the Britannia. They were lining up before the game and I was looking at the size of Arsenal and thinking people were saying we were a big team! They were massive, and if you look at the most successful teams they had, you had Emmanuel Petit and Patrick Vieira in midfield. They were six-foot-three, six-foot-four. Never mind the defenders. Thierry Henry’s six foot. They were all big, strong, physically capable athletes and they could all play as well! They are going to be better than you, on a technical level, so what you’ve got to do is make sure physically they don’t win that battle, and if you match that, if you’re well-organised, then on some days you’ll get results.