FIRST the good news. Since their first visit to Portman Road, as recently as 1954, Middlesbrough have constantly improved. But it would be hard to do any worse - they got hammered 6-1.

This was immediately after relegation from the first division and after a point at Plymouth on the opening day, they lost the next eight games, a record equalled under Bryan Robson 41 years later.

That run had begun with a home defeat by Ipswich, and this was only a week later. Boro actually led all the way to half-time with a Geoff Walker goal after only two minutes. Then they let in six. It remains their worst defeat at Portman Road.

Only four of the team lasted the season. Most were gone within a few weeks in the kind of high-speed rebuilding rarely seen until this week. Ipswich had just been promoted from Division Three North and went straight back down that season.

It takes a special talent to let a relegated team do the double over you (think Boro and West Brom last season). On the eve of the new season, Ipswich sacked their manager, and the new one took them back up two years later.

Alf Ramsey, as he was then, took them even further four years later, to the second division title. Forty years before the Tractor Boys, they were patronised as Ramsey's Rustics, but they won the League Championship in their first season.

Only one manager has done that since and he was very much a feature of these times. Brian Clough scored nine goals in eight games against Ramsey's Ipswich.

Had his career not ended just before Ramsey took over the England job it's a fair bet that he'd have added to his measly two caps in 1958. But imagine an England dressing room with Clough, Jack Charlton and Ramsey. The cups would have had to be plastic. And the walls padded.

It took Middlesbrough 13 years to win at Portman Road, and it proved a mixed blessing for both sides. John Hickton scored both the goals in December 1967, but Ipswich were very impressed with John O'Rourke.

A few weeks later the Boro squad were in a hotel before a game at Villa Park, and so were Ipswich. No agents then - they asked him, he said yes (as he was peeved after being dropped at Villa) and off he went, a hasty decision he's long regretted, even though his goals helped Ipswich to promotion that season.

The next meeting was in very different circumstances, in January 1975. It was between the top two in the league. Ipswich led, with Boro just behind them on goal average, through December. Boro had just drawn at Everton (Everton over Christmas! Plus ca change).

But the FA Cup tie against Wycombe, with extra-time, on the Wednesday took its toll, Ipswich won 3-0, and Boro never got as high again. In the end nor did Ipswich - Derby, lurking back in seventh, came with a late run to take the title. But Boro did win at Portman Road for the next two seasons.

The last visit in this division, 13 years ago, ended in chaos and farce, when the Suffolk Punch wasn't just a horse. Boro were leading 1-0 when Ipswich's James Scowcroft tried to outmuscle Nigel Pearson and, not surprisingly, ended up eating mud.

In the red mist that followed he somehow retained enough sense not to hit the Boro skipper. Instead he thumped the nearest Boro player, Craig Harrison, and was sent off. The linesman then made the game's crucial decision. He got it into his head that someone had hit Scowcroft, but that someone was Andy Townsend.

Eventually the difference between a six foot, long-haired teenager with a bruised cheek and blinding headache, and a 34-year-old with far less hair and far more waistline became clear.

But the red card was out and some quick thinking saw Harrison "volunteered" to walk, thus leaving the more influential, experienced Townsend on.

David Johnson then equalised with Ipswich's only shot on target, in injury-time. Harrison's card was later rescinded. It didn't end there though. At the Riverside a few weeks later Gianluca Festa was sent off after only 15 minutes for allegedly tripping Johnson, who appeared to have tripped over his own heels. The 10 men went ahead, through a vengeful Pearson, but again Johnson equalised later on.

Ten years earlier Bruce Rioch's side came badly unstuck in one of the shocks of the season at Portman Road. They were second with four games to go, and they were taken apart by a teenage Dalian Atkinson, who hit a hat-trick, even though they were playing with 10 men for much of the game, after Colin Cooper was sent off.

The Ipswich manager that day nearly pulled off an even bigger shock against another 10-man Boro side nine years later. He was John Duncan, by then with Chesterfield.

The last of Boro's five wins at Ipswich came in the inaugural Premiership season, thanks to a single Paul Wilkinson goal. It was also the last of Chris Kamara's three starts when he was on loan. He got very excited after the goal.

And on Boxing Day two seasons earlier Ian Baird scored the only goal to keep Colin Todd's side third. It was a header, but a header like few others, from somewhere near Bury St Edmunds - so far out it sailed over a bemused keeper.

It was also a rare occasion when Boro defied the computer, which had given them a four-hour trip. But normal service was resumed three days later as the microprocessor from hell sent them on an even longer journey to Bristol City, where the familiar post-Christmas slump began.

In May 1982 the slump had begun nine months earlier and, with four games to go, Boro lost 2-1 to Bobby Robson's title-chasing side, but the goal was the only one ever scored by Dave Thomas. He only came from up the road at West Auckland, but he was one of the dozens of players found by the legendary Burnley North East scouting system, which ran for 30 years from the 1950s.

Thomas was in the twilight of his career, which had brought England caps and almost a league title with QPR, but he was arguably the best crosser of a ball - with both feet - ever to wear a Boro shirt.

He had seemingly double-joined ankles, and could be haring off towards the by-line, apparently on collision course with the corner flag/advertising boards/ball boy like a Toyota Prius down Ormesby Bank, but suddenly whip over a cross without breaking stride. Unfortunately none of his team-mates had either the anticipation, bravery or nous to get on the end of most of them.

He was a descendant of one of the original West Auckland "World Cup" winners of 1911, when they beat the mighty Juventus, a story immortalised on film by Denis Waterman and Tim Healy.

But even he was out-Hollywooded by the Ipswich team that day - five of them starred in Escape to Victory alongside Pele, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine, who's body-double was former Ipswich and Boro star Kevin Beattie.

Thomas left to join Portsmouth at the end of the season, as their manager Alan Ball treated Middlesbrough like Gordon Strachan has Celtic - he signed four Boro players. And yes, omen-seekers, they were promoted. And then plunged back down and into receivership (plus ca change II).

The two most recent trips to Ipswich both ended in defeat. In October 2000 the 2-1 loss was in the middle of the run of one point from nine games that ended with Terry Venables' arrival.

A year later and another bad run, this time as Boro ended Steve McClaren's first season as they'd begun it, with four defeats in a row, the first three and the last three without scoring. This time it was post-semi-final depression, having lost to Arsenal through a Festa own goal.

It was the final game for Michael Debeve, on loan from Lens, whose only other game in England had been when he scored against Arsenal at Highbury to put them out of the European Cup and also for a left winger called AJ. Allan Johnston, dubbed "Magic" after the basketball player when he was at Sunderland, never came anywhere near that at the Riverside, but had an unforgettable first three games.

First, a 4-1 home defeat by Newcastle, then a League Cup win over Northampton, totally overshadowed as it was the night of 9/11, and the only goal of his Boro career in a win over West Ham. All in the space of a week.

But Ipswich was the first career game for another left winger, and a rather more successful one. Stewart Downing started the game, and er, that was it. He had two more sub appearances that season, and didn't start another league game until Boxing Day 2003, 18 months later.

A week before he'd come on and starred as a sub in the League Cup at Spurs, provoking six solid years of newspaper stories that he was to join them. The goal in that Ipswich defeat, by the way, was scored by serial Boro-destroyer Darren Bent. He'd just replaced his namesake, Marcus - who had had as much luck in front of goal as he did with Boro this season - and scored with virtually his first touch.

Any game against Ipswich in transfer window week immediately conjures up one name - Phil Whelan. Bryan Robson signed him from Ipswich in March 1995, but due to a registration mix-up he couldn't make his debut until the following season.

The "Sunderland defence" employed this week over Benjani didn't work - not the only Sunderland defence that doesn't work!

To say he was never a crowd favourite would be like saying Drogheda didn't really take to Cromwell. He ended up at Southend, where he was most famous for a Dyer/Bowyer moment, exchanging punches with fellow defender Leo Roget after conceding a goal against Hull.

Finally, if you think Middlesbrough gets a bad press, spare a thought for Ipswich. Long before Ramsey's Rustics its merchants were satirised by Chaucer in Canterbury Tales, it's regularly used as an example of some God-forsaken outpost at the edge of the universe in Dr Who and Torchwood (Rose compared it to exile in another dimension), and even in Monty Python's Parrot Sketch.

Jarvis Cocker wrote From Auschwitz to Ipswich and now it has to cope with Portman Road being East Anglia's answer to the Ripper's Whitechapel after the five murders there in 2006.

But, like Boro, they fight back - Tractor Boys, like Smoggies, is an insult turned into self-deprecating pride and games against Norwich are now known as...the Old Farm Derby.