The last time I, and most of the others at the ground today, had been inside Carrow Road was on 27th February last year. Norwich beat Leicester 1-0 with a driven half-volley from left back Jamal Lewis. 534 days on, almost all coronavirus related restrictions have been lifted and Carrow Road was back to full capacity. Having swiftly got through a long queue outside the ground, I took the familiar route to my seat in the upper tier of the Barclay end, where I saw familiar faces all together once again. It was as if we’d never been away – the masks on those faces the only sign that the pandemic had ever happened.
Carrow Road, ten minutes before kick off against Liverpool
It was quite emotional when a video was played on the big screen with the message ‘Welcome home, Canaries fans’ and the welcome the players received as they came out onto the pitch was something to behold. It’s good to be back and hopefully we’ll never be forced away again.
We’re not as good as Liverpool
Really, the main thing we learned from this game is that Norwich are not as good as Liverpool. We knew that already, so there’s no reason to be too downbeat about the result. Champions League winners in 2019, Premier League champions in 2020, Liverpool can put their slump in form last season down to the injury crisis they suffered in defence. Jurgen Klopp has a settled side that he has spent several years building and with Virgil van Dijk back from ten months out they look good for another push for the title. They also have a spell over Norwich, having beaten us in 13 of our last 15 encounters, so anything other than a Liverpool win would have been a major shock.
Positives to take
If you’re a pessimist, you might point out that Norwich starting brightly, fading away and then conceding goals is very much what they did on a regular basis when they were last playing at this level two years ago. It was the first game of the season, though, so let’s be lenient. All of Daniel Farke’s new signings did well and look like they will fit in just fine – when Milot Rashica and Teemu Pukki have played a few games together and developed an understanding their link up play could prove very fruitful. Billy Gilmour can pick one hell of a pass and Josh Sargent looked threatening in his brief substitute appearance. After a disrupted pre-season due to Covid-19 (which forced two friendlies to be cancelled) and players away at Euro 2020, things will get a lot better in the weeks ahead for City.
No one is going to be the slightest bit interested in reading about the Euro 2020 final, so I’m not going to write about it. Here’s the BBC match report if you insist.
Italy, it’s been great having you back on the major tournament stage. You were missed when you didn’t qualify for the 2018 World Cup. There’s something about that rock solid defence, attacking flair and blue shirts that appeals to the casual football fan.
But you can’t read a script can you? This wasn’t meant to be your time. You’ve had your time, over and over, in the past. This was meant to be England’s day. England had a story to complete. It’s not your fault that Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bakayo Saka took three absolutely horrendous penalties, granted. But come on.
Euro 2020 has been a great tournament – but it had the wrong ending.
I am prone to spells where I feel out of control and as if I’m ‘going mad’.
I’ll try not to bore you – this is about the benefits I believe there are to be had in going back to where you felt happiest and safest – but I need to give you some background information first.
The vast majority of my childhood was spent in the Mile Cross area of Norwich. Those who know it will probably not speak highly of it. It’s not a nice place. But for me, it was home. From when I was a toddler until I had to move away in 2010, aged 17.
Specifically, it was this house. The one you can see the side of here. That was my bedroom window for nearly 15 years.
This is from Google Maps, as I didn’t want to feel awkward taking a photo of what is now someone else’s house.
It’s now more than six years since I left, but I admit I just can’t get over it. I still wish I lived there. I still have dreams in which I am back on familiar ground. When I’m having one of my bad spells I think about it even more.
Today I had a bit of free time so I got in my car and went back to where I still call home.
Being back there, walking around the area, it was an odd feeling. It was as if my head was properly screwed on – I don’t remember even thinking about where I was going, my feet just took me on a circuit of the estate and right back to where I started.
You are entitled to think ‘for god’s sake, get over it and move on’, but believe me if it was that easy I would have done it a long time ago.
Not a great deal has changed. I only glanced at my old house as there was a car in the driveway and I’m not sure how I’d feel if I looked out of the window to see someone staring up at my home, but it was pretty much identical to how it looked when I was there. Although I don’t like their choice of curtains. Our old neighbours are also still there.
I went down a passageway out of the cul-de-sac and walking round to Bowers Avenue saw the first change. A newly built block of flats.
These flats weren’t there when I lived in this area.
I carried on and came to the biggest buildings on the estate.
These blocks of flats are unmistakably 1960s, and they are big enough to be seen from Mousehold Heath.
I ended up going down the hill and taking a walk around Sloughbottom Park, the scene of countless kickabouts with my dad and where I used to train with and play for the Norman Wanderers Under 11s and Under 13s before I realised – some time after everyone else – that I was hopeless at football.
Looking towards the changing rooms.
Looking towards the main road.
The very same pitch I played on 10 years ago.
The pitch was in a rather better state than it used to be when I played on it about a decade ago.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. You’ve put up with me being rather self-indulgent. But let me explain – I did this to attempt to reconnect with who I used to be. The happy, studious kid I was. For reasons I won’t share here, things went south for me when I stopped living here. So coming back enabled me to get those feelings of safety and security back, if only for an hour or so. Writing this up has helped me make it last that little bit longer.
Everyone has a place like this. A place where they have memories, a place where they were happy. If you’re feeling down or a bit lost, why not go back to that place? I promise you, it will do you the world of good.
Going to the football was the thing me and my dad did together.
Dad was 48 when I was born. He had the son he had always wanted – someone to kick a ball around with and watch the match with him. Yet I was a latecomer to football, and to his obsession with Norwich City. I can remember protesting that I wanted to watch cartoons when dad had sat himself in the living room ready for the Super Sunday game on Sky Sports.
My dad in his room in his care home, a Canary from beginning to end.
It is an old family tale that dad was a very handy footballer, who scored plenty of goals for teams such as Gothic. He was part of the Norwich Boys team, a side made up of players picked from local schools. He played at Carrow Road several times. He always insisted that someone from Norwich City asked his father about him turning professional, but his father refused and made his son go and get an apprenticeship. Whether that’s true I’m not so sure, but it’s a lovely story.
At some point, I became interested. Perhaps through sheer osmosis. I remember getting very excited at England beating Germany 5-1 a week after my 9th birthday. The next May I went through emotional turmoil watching the now defunct ITV Digital, who were showing Norwich’s agonising penalty shootout defeat to Birmingham in the Division One play-off final. I was in tears at the end of that game. At that point, the Canaries had got me. From then on I was a Norwich City fan, and I always would be.
Dad had got up extremely early that morning and travelled to Cardiff on a minibus to be at the match. On his return, our conversations about football would become more knowledgeable on my part, and increasingly partisan. He must have loved it. I can imagine him thinking ‘Finally! After nearly a decade my boy has got the football bug!’.
Less than a year later, in March 2003, I went to my first Norwich game. We lost 2-0 to Ipswich, of all teams, but that didn’t put me off. I was part of the enormous crowds as our Division One champions of 2004 celebrated with an open top bus parade. I recall both me and dad jumping up and down in pure elation as we went 2-0 up against Manchester United in what would be a brief stay in the Premier League. Dad was 61 at that point, but he certainly didn’t look it or move like it.
As the next few years passed dad’s memory became something of a concern. He had to give up working after more than 40 years. He was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
In August 2008, me and dad took our seats at Carrow Road for our first game sitting next to each other as season ticket holders. I had only been to the odd game a season up to that point. We sat three rows back in the upper Barclay, just to the right of the goal. We watched a 1-1 draw with Blackpool. We got relegated to League One that season. In fact, our first seasons with those tickets saw us witness a relegation, a promotion and another promotion. We sat through the 7-1 defeat to Colchester, through the 2-0 win over Gillingham that confirmed Norwich as League One champions, through the joyous last game of the season against Coventry as we celebrated promotion to the Premier League.
Dad’s undying faith in Norwich City showed in his score predictions. Ask him what he thought would happen in that particular game, and he would ask who we were playing. When I told him, he would usually say ‘we should beat them shouldn’t we?’ in a fantastically confident voice as if to say ‘of course we should beat them, we’re the mighty Norwich City!’. His predicted score would usually be 5-0 to City, but if he wasn’t feeling quite as confident that day we might only win 3-0.
Gradually, getting dad to and from Carrow Road became increasingly difficult. His particular type of dementia appeared to strike his mobility. He found it hard to walk, hard to negotiate stairs, and on one occasion he found it impossible to walk over the Novi Sad Friendship Bridge. A very kind couple stopped and helped me get him to the other side, where they waited with him while I ran to get the car. It was a desperately sad and worrying state to see him in, someone I had looked up to so much.
Dad cut down on his trips to see City play. I took him to what would turn out to be his last visit to Carrow Road on Boxing Day 2012, a 1-0 defeat to Chelsea. From then on I would carry on going to home games, but would go and sit with him in his care home to listen to the away matches on Radio Norfolk.
On 1st February 2014, just over a month short of his 70th birthday, my brilliant dad finally gave in to this most evil of diseases. This classic Norwich City song was played at his funeral. I still sit in the same Barclay seat as I did for that Blackpool match nearly seven years ago, and I have often wondered what my dad would make of the latest goings on in yellow and green.
These feelings have been particularly felt in the last week, with Norwich of course preparing for the Championship play-off final at Wembley. He would have been there, without a shadow of a doubt. And he would have loved the sight of around 40,000 fellow City fans inside the home of football.
I have decided to wear dad’s old City shirt to Wembley. This way, I know a part of my old man will be with me at the biggest game I’ve ever been to.
What would he say about the result?
‘Middlesbrough? We should beat them shouldn’t we?’
Me with my dad’s old Norwich shirt which I will be wearing to Wembley.
I found this video on YouTube recently. Uploaded by madmusician91, who must take all the credit for it, the video shows the last few minutes of Channel 4’s excellent live coverage of cricket:
England had just won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years, in what is regarded as the greatest Test series ever played. Cricket was in the public consciousness like it had not been since Botham’s Ashes of 1981, enjoying popularity akin to football, being talked about across the country. Ironic, then, that that series was to be the end not only of Channel 4’s coverage, but of live international cricket coverage as a whole on terrestrial television in the UK.
Television was still in its infancy when the BBC decided to show the Lord’s and Oval Tests against Australia in 1938. Very few people owned a television then – and if they did they were rich. Even so, whatever viewers there were got the chance to see Len Hutton score 364; at the time it was a world record and it is to this day the highest Test score by an Englishman. The BBC continued to show live England cricket right up until 1999.
Test cricket at Old Trafford in 2014 – but you needed to pay to see it on television.
Pay television first made an impact on live England home matches at this point – Sky Sports shared coverage with Channel 4. Rupert Murdoch’s network had already been showing England tours since 1990, but this was their first foray into home internationals. The rights deal, however, remained in favour of the terrestrial broadcaster. Sky showed just the one Test match each summer, with the other five or six on Channel 4. Sky showed all of the one day matches live.
In 2004, to some surprise, the England and Wales Cricket Board announced that it had awarded exclusive rights to England home matches to Sky Sports. This meant that from 2006, fans would have to pay to watch England play live for the first time. The deal went ahead despite a campaign to ‘Keep Cricket 4 Us’ and with an extension until 2017 cricket will only be shown as highlights on Channel 5.
While Sky’s money has been invested in grassroots cricket, with the sport not easily accessible to the general public interest has inevitably waned. The conclusion of Sky’s first live Ashes series in 2009 was watched by just under 2 million viewers, with the average throughout the day at 856,000. Compare this to Channel 4’s live coverage of the 2005 Ashes finale – 7.4 million watched the end of play, with an average of 4.7 million between the lunch break and the close.
With such a gulf in viewing figures between the pay TV channel and the terrestrial, there remain calls for live England cricket to return to free-to-air television. With no prospect of this until at least 2018, however, it looks like an hour of highlights per day is all we will have to satisfy us for now.
LEE PAYNE 