LEE PAYNE

Tag: sport

  • Whiny Wilder rubs tired City’s noses in it

    I nicknamed Chris Wilder, the Sheffield United manager, ‘Whiny’ after his hilariously bitter reaction to losing to Norwich earlier this season. Not only does he look like what I see in my mind’s eye when I think of the typical Brexit voter, but Wilder lost all credibility when he tried to blame the City coach driver for his side’s defeat.

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    Chris ‘Whiny’ Wilder

    All this made it all the more galling this afternoon when Whiny Wilder walked over to the Blades fans pumping his fists in the air having just taken the three points from Carrow Road. While I will never be able to take him seriously after his rant, they clearly love him, and you’d expect that having finally got them out of League One and taking a group of bang average players into the top six more than halfway through the Championship season.

    Norwich’s heroic performance against Chelsea on Wednesday had done the world of good for the club’s image, with disillusioned City fans getting firmly back on board and the casual BBC One viewer being impressed with the effort put in against the champions. Having worked so hard at Stamford Bridge, however, and with such a thin squad it was inevitable that tiredness would be a factor. Daniel Farke would have been keen to avoid using that as an excuse, but it was clear that there were weary legs among the City team and while they huffed and puffed they didn’t have enough to win today.

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    City’s efforts at Chelsea in midweek put them at a disadvantage today

    Sheffield United’s first goal, early on, could have been defended better but really it was a pot shot that happened to find the net. Their second, coming just as Norwich looked to be close to an equaliser, came through the combination of an ill advised Alex Tettey backpass and the poor decision of Angus Gunn not to charge out of his goal to try and clear. Gunn has been brilliant this season, but from my vantage point in the Barclay I do think this was his error. By choosing to stay on his line he made it too easy for the striker.

    I overheard on the way out of the ground that, yet again, it was a defender that had to score Norwich’s goal. While left back Jamal Lewis was the scorer against Chelsea, right back Ivo Pinto gave us hope very soon after Sheffield United’s second – but it wasn’t to be. With James Maddison having an off day (which he is allowed, ignoring the fact he was being kicked all over the place by Sheffield United’s players) it was left to Nelson Oliveira to get a goal from a forward position. Nelson continued to do what he’d done for most of this season, though, and that is spray it all over the place. Norwich need to sign a striker and they need to do it soon. Before the end of January.

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    Ivo Pinto, Norwich captain and goalscorer

    When these two teams met at Bramall Lane, the Sheffield United fans could not accept that Norwich had simply done a job on them and they had been beaten by the better side on the day. They, like their manager, were incredibly bitter about City’s so-called ‘antics’. There was nothing unusual about what City did that day. Every team, every single one, will do their best to waste a bit of time when they are protecting a narrow lead away from home. Ironically, this is exactly what Sheffield United did today. They didn’t win the game through beautiful football, they closed it out by wasting time. So despite some of the Blades fans saying they ‘wouldn’t want to support a team that plays like that’, it turns out that they do and are quite happy about it.

    It was another irritating home defeat for Norwich but we must not get too down about it. It was clear at Chelsea that there is something building under Daniel Farke and I think it might be next season before we really see the benefit of it. From what I’ve seen today, I can’t see Sheffield United sustaining a promotion push either. Their squad is nothing special and they should be happy with a top half finish. City may have come up short today, but at least you won’t find our manager blaming the opposition’s coach driver for it.

  • The pain at the Arsenal

    I have just returned from a brilliant trip to London, where I went to my first Norwich City away match at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.

    The plan was to make an event of it, so instead of going straight there and straight back on the coach with other fans I went on the train on Tuesday morning, stayed in a hotel in Finsbury Park and came back on Wednesday lunchtime.

    I was aware that my hotel was within walking distance of the ground, but I didn’t expect to be able to see it from my window!

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    The Emirates Stadium was visible from my hotel room
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    Zoomed in

    I walked to the stadium well before kick off, to properly take in the atmosphere. I had been outside the Emirates once before, but that was during the day when there was no one around. It was a different sight all lit up with thousands of people there.

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    Outside the Emirates
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    Near where the away fans go in

    I made my way to the end where my fellow Norwich fans were going to be sitting, and immediately felt a warmth come over me seeing yellow shirts and hearing familiar songs – I was amongst my own people! With an hour to go before kick off, I went inside and found my seat, giving me my first sight of the pitch.

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    The view from my seat

    Before long the Norwich players came out to warm up at our end, to great applause. There is a real feeling of togetherness about the club at the moment. The fans are right behind the players, the players are putting the effort in for the fans and they are buying into what the manager is trying to do. It’s lovely to see. There were particularly loud cheers for James Maddison, who scored the winner in the derby on Sunday.

     

    Norwich's goalkeepers Angus Gunn and Michael McGovern warm up
    Norwich’s goalkeepers Angus Gunn and Michael McGovern warm up
    The Norwich players preparing for the game
    The Norwich players preparing for the game

    Arsenal have a sort of TV show on the big screens inside the stadium for pre-match, half time and post-match. I don’t really think it works. I’ve seen it done at cricket grounds, and often it’s hard to hear the presenter and a lot of the time you don’t want to because they are really annoying. Arsenal’s presenter didn’t win any friends amongst the Norwich fans by introducing us as Ipswich! That’s pretty much the worst thing you can say about us.

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    This bloke introduced us as Ipswich!

    Then it was the match itself. You probably know that the game went all the way to extra time, with the eventual score being Arsenal 2-1 Norwich. The Norwich players put in a very good performance, going in front in the first half when Josh Murphy finished nicely after running onto a great Maddison pass and defending excellently until the 86th minute when a young guy I’d never heard of called Eddie Nketiah tapped in from a corner 15 seconds after coming on as a substitute for Arsenal. He then scored the winner in the first half of extra time. Norwich had come agonisingly close to pulling off an upset – one they would have deserved – but it wasn’t to be.

    I was proud of the team, though, and very proud to be in the crowd. The nearly 9,000 Norwich fans that were there put the Arsenal fans to shame. Boxer and City fan Anthony Ogogo says he was racially abused by one of our number last night, which is totally unacceptable and that person is merely a sad individual who has nothing to do with this wonderful football club. I certainly didn’t hear anything untoward, and I think we represented the city brilliantly.

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    The Norwich players in a huddle after the game
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    The Canaries thank the fans for their great support

    My first experience of seeing Norwich play on another team’s turf was one I’ll never forget, and one I hope to repeat in the future. We may not have won, we may be out of the cup, but I got a real sense that the club is in good shape at the moment and that if we can carry on performing like we did on Tuesday night then we can achieve something in the league this season.

     

  • Cricket 4 The Masses

    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.
    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.