LEE PAYNE

Tag: football

  • David Wagner is Norwich City’s new manager – this is a watershed moment for the club

    The events of the last week will, I think, prove to be a watershed moment for Norwich City Football Club.

    Former Huddersfield manager David Wagner is the new man in charge of Norwich City

    The displeasure and the disconnect felt by the fans was not only about the club’s repeated inability to put up a fight in the Premier League. It was deeper than that. We felt like we were being taken for granted. The people in power had shut themselves away and lost touch with us. The head coach just didn’t seem to ‘get’ Norwich.

    I found myself in the unusual position of directly calling for the manager to be sacked. Norwich isn’t a club that is known for wielding the axe. A manager tends to be given enough – some might say more than enough – time to make their mark and see out a tough time. The end comes when a natural conclusion is reached.

    Only thirteen months into the job, however, Dean Smith had to go. Many were sceptical about his appointment in the first place. He would have had to hit the ground running to get those people on board. It wouldn’t have taken much to turn the atmosphere toxic.

    On the pitch, Smith failed. It is as simple as that. He was given the job to keep Norwich in the Premier League and they were relegated with a whimper, rock bottom. Then it was to get them straight back up. He left with the automatic promotion places a long way away.

    These players haven’t become bad all of a sudden. Several of them have won the Championship title twice with us before. It’s unrealistic to expect them to stroll to a third, but for that squad to be in mid table, looking average at best, is not good enough. Teemu Pukki is a striker with a proven record at this level who would be picked by any other team in the division, yet he is having a quiet season by his standards. Max Aarons had been touted for a lucrative move to some of the world’s biggest clubs, yet his form this season has seen him at times unable to get into the starting eleven. Marcelino Nunez arrived in the summer with a legion of fans in his native Chile, excited about their man showing the English game what he was capable of. He displayed his skill and flair early on but has gone off the boil as time has gone on. My only explanation for this is the way these players have been coached. Dean Smith (and his assistant, Craig “Shakey” Shakespeare) have taken good players and made them worse.

    The fans became bored of the ponderous, directionless style of play. As the situation came to a head, they would boo when the ball was played back to the centre halves or goalkeeper. We actually did a lot of playing out from the back under the much loved Daniel Farke, but it always felt like there was a purpose to it. We have memories of many beautiful goals, a culmination of tens of passes, to prove it. The football under Smith was too predictable, too easy to play against, too lacking in entertainment.

    When planning to write this, I looked up the records of Norwich’s previous managers and discovered that the percentage of games that we won under Smith (28.57%) was the worst for a permanent coach since the 27 game spell of Gary Megson (18.5%) in 1995-96.

    On the pitch, Smith was a write-off. He might be a ‘good bloke’ and a ‘good coach’ – the Aston Villa fans showered him with love when he first came to Norwich, but months down the line admitted that he didn’t really have a plan for a Villa side that didn’t have Jack Grealish in it. He will probably get another job soon (he has already been linked with the vacant position at Portsmouth) and enjoy some modest success. I don’t have any ill will towards the guy now he’s gone. Some managers fit a club and some don’t.

    The dull performances and bad results on the field made me refuse to go and watch our home games for two months. I saw the defeat to Luton on 18th October and didn’t return until the draw with Reading on 30th December, the first game after Smith’s sacking. But it wasn’t the actual football that hurt me the most.

    The relationship between a football club and its fans is special. Mess with it at your peril. It isn’t about eleven men or women trying to kick a ball into a net. Your football club represents your home. It represents you. For a lot of us, the team’s achievements are our achievements. We feel personal success when they do well.

    Norwich is special. The people of this fine city, this fine isolated city, are fiercely proud of it. That is reflected in the football club. We are a club that has always done things differently, where the fans have not been treated as customers but as the lifeblood of the whole thing.

    Daniel Farke completely got that. It might seem shallow, but the way he would always applaud every section of the stadium at the end of a game made us feel valued. I was never expecting Dean Smith to wave his arms around and give it the full “olé” to all four corners of Carrow Road, but the bloke never even came on the pitch. It was just a small sign that he was there to work with the players and not with us. He probably never saw it that way but that’s how it felt. That approach never had a long term future at Norwich City.

    Daniel Farke always showed his appreciation for the Norwich fans

    Smith didn’t seem to like us and his uninspiring press conferences didn’t help either. I became resentful. I didn’t want to look down from the Barclay and see him on the touchline as the face of my club. I used my platform, a column once a month in the Eastern Daily Press, to say the club needed a new manager. I did it twice, actually, and the second time I was stronger. Strong enough that I wondered if they would print it without toning it down. To their credit they did. I obviously had no part to play in Smith leaving, the tide was already going that way, but a week after the second column he was sacked. I could look at my club with optimism again.

    The most pleasing thing, for me, was something that the sporting director Stuart Webber said in an interview with Sky Sports on Monday:

    “I’ve been here for six years. I’ve had a great time here, a great fanbase with great numbers that turn up. But I probably didn’t appreciate quite how important that connection between the head coach and the fanbase until it wasn’t there. 

    I’d only known that with Daniel (Farke). We finished 14th in the first season but ultimately the fans wanted to believe in him because the fans had that connection. 

    It’s not about having a happy clapper that walks on to the pitch to keep the fans happy because that doesn’t work if there’s no substance behind his work. 

    We as a football club have to be aware that it’s important we get someone that really understands the community, the fanbase because it’s a little bit unique in that respect.” 

    — Stuart Webber

    It seems that, at last, the penny may have dropped. It is not enough to just bring in a manager with strong footballing credentials, they have to be able to connect with the fans.

    A shiver went down my spine when I heard the names of Steve Bruce and Chris Wilder mentioned. Two men I certainly don’t want leading my club. But it would appear that they were only rumours, and rumours that were always wide of the mark.

    In the end, Webber has returned to someone he has worked with before. Someone he has had success with before. Someone born in Germany. Someone who has previously managed Borussia Dortmund’s reserve team.

    Alas, it’s not a stunning return for Daniel Farke. It’s actually a friend of his and his predecessor in that Dortmund job. It’s David Wagner.

    Wagner is best known in this country for his time in charge of Huddersfield Town, where he led them to a surprise Premier League promotion via the play-offs in 2017 and then, even more impressively, kept them there with a successful battle against relegation. It was the first time Huddersfield had been in the top flight since 1972. He left in the January of Huddersfield’s second Premier League season with the club eight points adrift of safety, but he remains well liked for his achievements in West Yorkshire and for the Gegenpressing style of play he implemented.

    In Wagner, Norwich have a manager in place who is hungry for success after a couple of short spells at Schalke and Swiss side Young Boys. He is likely to have a clear plan for how he wants his team to play, and that plan is likely to have Pukki licking his lips. He will also have the backing of the fans.

    This feels right. It feels like it might work. We might just have the manager we need. And if out of all of this we have a hierarchy that will never again underestimate the importance of the fans to Norwich City, these are good times indeed.

  • FIFA 23 – it’s not really in the game, is it?

    This is going to be a tad niche, even going by the previous things I’ve written. What follows will only be of interest to you if you’ve played the computer game FIFA. A hugely successful game, yes, and one that tops the charts every year, but I doubt something my usual readers will have had much to do with.

    The next edition, FIFA 23, is coming out at the end of September and having owned every one since 2001 I’m seriously considering not buying it. It’s because it feels like it’s increasingly being made for a younger audience, an audience that speaks a different language to me. All the nonsense about “xG”, “top bins” and a new goal celebration called “The Griddy” – this isn’t the football I know and love. It is also obsessed with its Ultimate Team mode (which makes developer EA an absolute fortune), and I have no interest in it.

    I have always liked playing Career Mode, where I can put myself in the game as a manager and take over pretty much any club in the game. Invariably, this would start off with me taking charge of my beloved Norwich City. You can play out fifteen seasons, and as well as playing each match you could buy and sell players and bring youth players through.

    But there’s so much more this mode could do. In terms of youth scouting, you hire a scout who you can send on a trip. You determine where they go, how long for and what sort of players they are looking for. Each month the scout will send you a report listing the players they’ve found. The list will show roughly how good the player is now and roughly how good the scout thinks the player could become. How accurate these assessments are depends on how good the scout is, i.e. how much you’re paying them. You can then choose to sign the player, reject them or scout them for a bit longer.

    The trouble is, if you sign a player they are simply added to a youth squad that doesn’t do anything. There are no Under 18 or Under 23 teams in the game, so youth players just remain on this list until you either promote them to the first team or they get fed up and threaten to leave. The players do very gradually improve, but if you’re managing a Premier League or Championship club they are very rarely good enough to play in the first team straight away. You usually end up selling them for a nice little profit and then you might come across them playing against you a few years later, but there’s very little for you in developing a young player in the mode’s current state.

    What FIFA’s career mode really needs is a proper system of U18 and U23 leagues. The young players you’ve scouted could then play some games against other clubs’ academies, keeping them happy and providing them with tangible ways to improve. The manager of these sides could provide you with a report on each match, telling you the result and who played well and who didn’t. The U23s would also be an opportunity to give players who need game time in your main squad a run out. Perhaps FIFA could even go really deep and allow you to start your career managing an U18 or U23 side yourself, rising through the ranks to eventually take the reins of the first team. This would give career mode a whole new dynamic, giving you an incentive to stay at a club for a number of years to see these young players you’ve scouted break through and become mainstays in your first team.

    Now I’d like to move on to international management. At present, you have to start off managing a club and then when you start making a name for yourself you are offered a job managing a national team. If you accept, however, you don’t leave your club side – you continue to manage it alongside whichever country you’ve accepted the offer from. This is most unrealistic, unheard of really in actual football. FIFA should allow you to manage a national team and only a national team. You should be able to request scouting reports on players you can pick in your squad, organise friendlies and training camps, and take your side into a World Cup or contintental competition. This would make you feel more involved and therefore care more about the country you’re in charge of – at the moment the international breaks feel like a chore and an unwanted intteruption to managing your club.

    Those are my two biggest wishes for career mode. There’s more I could say, and more I could ask for from the rest of the game. Quick substitutes, for instance. But it’s clear that FIFA 23 will be another cash cow, unwilling to make the changes to truly put it amongst the elite. This year’s edition will be the final one to bear the FIFA name – can we hope for better from the new iteration, EAFC? I won’t hold my breath.

  • Norwich hit a bum note on their Carrow Road return

    Norwich City 1-1 Wigan Athletic
    EFL Championship
    Saturday 6th August 2022, Carrow Road

    It’s going to take some time for the relegation hangover to clear for this Norwich City team. The first home game of the new season, with its warm sunshine, fresh kits and sense of optimism, was met with a performance that lacked quality and coherence. Back in my seat in the Barclay for the first time since 23rd April, here are a few thoughts I had from the Wigan game.

    Some of these players have got a lot to prove

    I may get shot down in flames for this but every Ben Gibson error at the back and every failed Milot Rashica cross made me wonder: do these players have a future at Norwich? Gibson, Rashica, Todd Cantwell and Josh Sargent all failed to inspire and they have a lot to prove in the games ahead. Dean Smith will be aware that a poor start to the season would put his job on the line so he can’t afford any passengers.

    We still can’t take a corner

    Back in June, Norwich appointed Allan Russell as the club’s first ever dedicated set piece coach. Whatever he’s been doing at Colney, it has yet to translate onto the pitch. It’s extraordinary how Norwich never look like scoring from a corner, and they don’t look assured when they are defending them either. This is nothing new but with someone in place purely to work on them, it’s something you’d expect to improve going forward.

    Between a rock and a VAR-d place

    No one likes VAR. No one likes the way it takes half an hour out of the game and then they still get the decisions wrong. But then, the referee at Carrow Road was really rather poor and Norwich should have had at least one penalty. If we’d had the dreaded VAR, maybe we’d have got what we deserved.

    Wigan’s behaviour should be seen as a positive for Norwich

    The time wasting from Wigan in the second half, which saw multiple players booked, should be taken as a compliment by Norwich. Clearly, for last season’s League One champions, a point at Carrow Road is a great result. City need to get used to teams that defend deep and waste time like they did today and learn how to break them down.

    Two games down, forty-four to go. Norwich are yet to register a win – they go to Hull next Saturday – but these are very early days. With the new players bedding in, patience is the order of the day.

  • England are champions of Europe and it feels fantastic

    England are the champions of Europe. I, and no one else who holds their national pride through the prism of sport, will ever tire of saying that.

    The power of sport is incredible. It brings people together, it divides them, it captures the nation’s attention and it even brings about huge changes in society. I am so grateful to have sport in my life and I don’t know what I would do without it. On Sunday afternoon, I rushed home from work to watch the final on TV. A peak audience of 17.4 million tuned into the BBC, making it the most watched women’s football match ever on UK television.

    The match itself was an emotional wrangle. It was tense throughout, the two finalists were well matched and clearly the two best teams in the tournament. Ella Toone’s sublime finish gave England the lead in the second half, only for Germany to level through Lina Magull. Tabea Wassmuth dragged England captain Leah Williamson out of position, allowing Magull the space to finish.

    At that point, I felt like the Germans just hadn’t read the script. Like the Italian men last year. This wasn’t their story. The Wembley crowd – 87,192, a record for a Euros match for men or women – were desperate for England to go all the way and put the crowning glory on a fantastic tournament. On the radio on the way home from work, I heard a German journalist say “Germany wants to win it. England needs to win it.” He was right. England had done so well, but they really needed to make that final step.

    Extra time came and the dreaded penalty shootout was looming. Everyone knows we don’t beat the Germans at penalties. Thank heavens, then, for Chloe Kelly poking the ball over the line from a (North Walsham born) Lauren Hemp corner and putting England back in front with ten minutes to go. The celebrations were wild. For once, England weren’t following the script.

    The way England saw out the game was masterful. Keeping it in the corner, drawing cheap fouls from the increasingly frustrated Germans, not giving them a sniff of coming back. Then, the referee (who had a really poor game, by the way) put the whistle to her lips. She waited a couple of seconds and then blew. No one knew what to do with themselves. England had won Euro 2022, the country’s first major tournament victory in football since 1966.

    Here, we were embracing each other in pure delight. It feels so good because it happens so rarely. Germany, for instance, were aiming to win the Women’s Euros for the ninth time. It wouldn’t have felt so joyous and momentous for them. England, with the years of dreaming, the heartbreak, the near-misses… it all felt like it was leading up to that moment.

    I have spent a lot of time and energy arguing with men – and it is always men – on Twitter about women’s sport. Tired clichés about how ‘no one cares’, ‘the standard is shocking’, ‘they should be in the kitchen’. Well, last night they were categorically rendered incorrect and irrelevant. I just love sport and I don’t care if the people playing it are male or female. The quarter-final against Spain and the final against Germany comfortably matched the quality of any men’s football match I can think of, and I am so proud that this incredibly likeable squad will have inspired women and girls across the country to start playing and to dream big.

    It’s been an amazing few years for women’s sport in the UK. England won the cricket World Cup in 2017, Emma Raducanu won the US Open last year at the age of just 18, and the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games are the first to award more gold medals to women than men. It’s wonderful to see.

    So, if you’re one of those blokes who avoided the game yesterday because you feel threatened and intimidated by seeing a woman play sport, I have a question for you:

    Who had the better evening?

  • Winning or entertainment? My last newspaper column of the 2021-22 season

    The topic of why we invest so much of our time, money and emotions into this sport is one I’ve tried to tackle before without coming to any real conclusions. I think it’s a bit like searching for the meaning of life. If you start to think too deeply about it, you realise you have no idea.

    My last newspaper column of the season for the Eastern Daily Press is available to read online now.

  • I bought a 58-year-old football magazine

    Garden centres are usually my idea of hell but a few days ago I went to one that was a bit different. It had all the boring things, of course, like pots and plants, but it also had what they called a ‘retro shop’. An eclectic mix of items for sale with the only thing in common with each other being that they had spent years unused in someone’s house/shed/garage. There were old radios, guitars, weird wooden ornaments; it would take hours to go through it all.

    As a former collector of The Beano and The Dandy, my eyes were drawn to a pile of comics and magazines. While neither of those were anywhere to be seen, there were several Marvel and DC Comics titles, including a couple where the ‘new hero’ Doctor Strange – a character first seen in 1963 and recently played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a film – was mentioned on the front cover. Eventually, I stumbled upon a copy of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly.

    The August 1964 issue of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly I bought at the retro shop

    I love this sort of thing. Just like the comics, a magazine is like a time capsule. They quite literally document the time they were published. I have to admit, I’d never heard of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly. The issue I found in the shop was from August 1964, a full 28 years before I was born.

    The first thing I noticed was that it was in colour. I doubt many people will have seen colour photographs of football matches in 1964. Newspapers were still very much black and white and on the rare occasions a game was televised it would have been in monochrome too, as colour television did not begin broadcasting in Britain until 1967. You can really see this standing out in a newsagent’s.

    I’ve always found something charming about old adverts. They were usually straight to the point and back then there was little regulation of the advertising industry, so the claims made in them were bold to say the least. Look at these two, for example. ‘Actual Tests’ (what actual tests? Who did the tests? What were they testing? How did they do the tests?) prove you can increase your strength 20% in 1 month (how do you measure strength to such degrees?) with astonishing new 6-second exercises! This company even offers to give you your money back if you don’t ‘get the kind of physique girls admire super quick’.

    This one promises to ‘enable to gain up to 6 ins. in height’. I’m pretty sure I get emails about this kind of thing nowadays, but they are usually pledging to help me gain six inches somewhere else.

    I suppose once you had become 20% stronger and 6 inches taller you might then have had the physique that the Manchester City Police were looking for.

    Now for some of the actual football content. As this was a summer issue looking back at the previous season and ahead to the next, the team photographs of the champions of all four English leagues were featured. The Liverpool photo is notable for the presence of both Bill Shankly, who was manager at the time, and Bob Paisley, who was merely ‘trainer’ (first team coach in modern terms) then but would of course go on to take the top job and win six league titles and three European Cups in charge of the Reds.

    Below them are second division champions Leeds, promoted to the top flight under Don Revie. This was the start of a golden period for the club, in which they would be league champions twice and win the FA Cup in 1972. Several of the stars of that side were already present – Billy Bremner, Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Johnny Giles.

    This might have been my favourite page in the whole magazine. Readers would write in, offering to exchange, for example, ‘Man. Utd. [programmes] for Sunderland and Arsenal’. Charmingly, many would also seek pen pals so they had someone to talk about their interests with by letter. When you think about it, this was an early form of social media. People have always wanted to reach out to others, it’s just that these days you simply write a tweet and can be bombarded with abuse just seconds later. The best one on this page, for me, was from S. Baird of Accrington, who was offering ‘200 First Division Autographs’ in exchange for ‘Screaming Lord Sutch Wig and Top Hat’. So many questions.

    With my beloved Norwich City dropping like a stone towards the Championship once again, I scoured the magazine for mentions of the team in the hope that things might have been going slightly better in 1964. Alas, the second division table has us sixth from bottom.

    Now we come to the letters page. Paul Carter from Liverpool wanted football to do more for charity. The Charity (now Community) Shield had been going for decades by this point, so he can’t claim the credit for that, but football is certainly used for fundraising purposes on a frequent basis now.

    Finally, I give you D. Kilbride, who doubted Bobby Moore’s suitability to be the captain of England and suggested Jimmy Armfield be given the job instead.

    Two years later…

    Thanks for reading.

  • This one’s for you, dad…

    Latest newspaper column

    As you probably know by now, I write a column for the Eastern Daily Press. It’s about Norwich City FC and there are four of us who write one to be published in the paper on a Tuesday during the football season. We rotate, so I have one every four weeks.

    When I realised that it would be my turn on Tuesday 1st February, thoughts turned to my dear old dad. On 1st February 2014, he passed away at the age of 69 from Alzheimer’s disease. He was a mad Norwich fan and is largely responsible for me supporting the club, so I thought it would be nice to dedicate my column to him.

    Click here to read it now, and if you happen to be in a shop tomorrow you can read it in the paper as well.

  • We won a game of football! | Norwich Nuggets: Everton (h)

    Adam Idah scored as Norwich beat Everton 2-1 at Carrow Road

    Morale has been so low around Norwich City Football Club recently that I didn’t even go to the Boxing Day game against Arsenal – I was pretty scathing in my latest column in the paper, too. Six straight defeats, no goals for more than nine hours, rock bottom of the league – I didn’t head to Carrow Road today in a particularly optimistic mood.

    Wonders will never cease, however, and a couple of crazy minutes in the first half followed by a tense and scrappy second half brought the result of Norwich 2-1 Everton. We won a game of football! So what have we learnt?

    Adam Idah may have found a role in this team

    I’ll be honest, I’ve never really rated Adam Idah. He doesn’t score enough goals for me and he gets knocked off the ball too easily. But today might just be a turning point for him. Instead of playing as an out-and-out striker, he played in a position behind Teemu Pukki and it really seemed to suit him. His hold up play was as good as I’ve seen it, he helped the midfield out when they needed it and when his chance came he took it well for his first Premier League goal. One swallow does not make a summer, but this is definitely worth persisting with.

    Let’s not lower ourselves to time wasting, please

    I get it. Norwich hadn’t won for such a long time in the league that they’ve sort of forgotten how to do it. In the rare situation of having a lead to protect, they seemed to start wasting as much time as possible from a ludicrously early point in the second half. When Richarlison scored a rather excellent overhead kick to make it 2-1, we went into overdrive with the running down of the clock.

    Some fans will lap this up, as so many teams have done it to us, they will have loved seeing Norwich do it to someone else. But I’d rather we didn’t lower ourselves to that level. I would prefer the team to have the belief that they can see a game out properly. The feigning of injuries made for a scrappy game.

    Watford away is a massive game

    As the clock ticked slowly through the seven minutes of added time, it felt like a crucial point in Norwich’s season – if they were to concede and only come away with a point, it would be a crushing blow that might well have put the final nail in the coffin. By seeing it out and getting the three points, suddenly the relegation battle is not over and with Watford and Newcastle drawing today our next game could see us move out of the bottom three.

    Deliciously, our next game is at Watford, live on TV on Friday night. There’s every chance we’ll lose, but… you never know. It’s the hope that kills you.

    Norwich held on for a massive three points

  • ‘He’s a coach. He knows what he’s doing’ | Norwich Nuggets: Southampton (h)

    Oh, how I’ve missed that winning feeling. Walking amongst the crowds back to my car after Norwich City 2-1 Southampton, there was a buzz that had been missing so far this season. Having won none of their first ten games, the Canaries now have back-to-back Premier League victories for the first time since 2016 and, having failed to win on any of the previous 32 occasions they had gone behind in a top-flight game, they secured the three points today.

    New Norwich manager Dean Smith adorned the front of the matchday programme

    I overheard someone talking on his phone near the burger van outside Carrow Road after the game. He was telling whoever was on the other end, quite rightly, that Norwich were poor in the first half (that was not the word he used, mind) but that new head coach Dean Smith ‘sorted it out at half time’ and said ‘he’s a coach. He knows what he’s doing.’ I agree with this unknown gentleman and, for me, that was the most impressive outcome from the game. City were dreadful in the first half and were very lucky to go in level at the break. Smith clearly noticed what was going wrong and corrected it, as they were a far better side when they came back out and deserved their win.

    Max Aarons is more of a winger than a full back

    Southampton’s Kyle Walker-Peters must not have been able to believe the amount of space he had on the Carrow Road pitch in the first half. The number of times that the ball was pinged to him completely unguarded beggared belief, and this was the fault of Max Aarons. There is a lot to admire about the academy product but he is constantly drawn out of position and it feels like he might be better suited to playing on the wing, running at the opposition and putting in crosses, with a more defensively minded player at full back.

    Good to see Cantwell and Gilmour back in the fold

    Billy Gilmour grew into the game for Norwich City

    Daniel Farke seemed to have given up on both Todd Cantwell and Billy Gilmour towards the end of his tenure. It was positive to see both players very much involved with Dean Smith’s first couple of training sessions and certainly to see both in the starting eleven today. Cantwell didn’t have the best of games, clearly lacking in match sharpness and appearing to pull a muscle before being substituted at half time, but Gilmour grew into the game and his well-directed corner allowed Grant Hanley to head home Norwich’s winner. The Scot on loan from Chelsea was named the sponsor’s man of the match.

    Off the bottom – is the great escape on?

    It feels like a long time ago now but Norwich finally got their first win of the season at Brentford before the international break and backed that up with another three points today. Combined with the boost that a change in manager usually brings, there is a growing hope that City might be able to grind out enough points to stay in the Premier League. They have moved off the bottom of the table, thanks to Newcastle remaining winless, and appear to be on an upward trajectory. At the very least, they are no longer cut adrift.

    Captain Grant Hanley headed the winning goal for Norwich from a corner

  • Thoughts on Norwich City and the new manager

    Earlier today I was contacted by someone from a website looking for a Norwich fan to answer a couple of questions about how the season has been going, what went wrong for Daniel Farke and what the hopes were for the new manager Dean Smith. As it turned out, by the time I’d written my piece they had found someone else and didn’t need me. So it doesn’t go to waste, here’s what I wrote:

    Verdict on season so far

    It couldn’t have gone much worse. I approached Norwich’s return to the Premier League with some trepidation because I feel as fans we are still damaged from the awful experience we had last time. When the fixture list came out and gave us the champions, the previous champions and the FA Cup winners in our first three games I was concerned that we would be playing catch up and low on confidence from a very early stage and that is exactly what happened.

    Dean Smith is now the manager of Norwich City

    Verdict on manager

    There will always be a lot of love for Daniel Farke from Norwich fans. When he took over the club had a poor squad, full of players who either weren’t good enough or didn’t want to be here. He played a big role in the development of James Maddison and the money we received from selling him to Leicester helped to get the club back onto a sound financial footing. I have never seen a Norwich manager with such confidence in youth – Max Aarons, Ben Godfrey, Jamal Lewis, Todd Cantwell and Andrew Omobamidele are just some of the academy products that blossomed under his guidance. He had a real connection with the fans and, in supposedly one of the hardest leagues of them all to get out of, delivered the Championship title twice.

    Sadly, he was never able to crack the Premier League. I had desperately hoped that he had learned from two years ago and this time would take us into the top flight with an attitude of ‘unfinished business’. Unfortunately, he shied away from the attractive, possession-based style of play that had brought us success and tried to make the team play in a way that they weren’t capable of. By the end, he didn’t seem to know what his best eleven was or how to arrange them on the pitch and he simply ran out of road. I have seen the world ‘underwhelming’ used a lot in the reaction to the appointment of Dean Smith (including from myself) but the more I think about it, the more I think he fits. He just needs to find the right combination to get the club feeling good about itself again. I am convinced that the squad have not shown anywhere near to what they can do so far and if he can get them going then I honestly think we could still stay up. Good luck to him, we will be right behind him.