So far this season Canaries fans have witnessed an exciting new dawn, seen their team become the Championship’s top goal scorers, endured an injury crisis and one of the most humbling defeats in their recent history. All this before October. Some clubs seem to go entire seasons without such dramatic highs and lows.
Since Norwich City lost to Birmingham on penalties in the 2002 Play-Off final we never seem to be far away from either an open top bus parade or a humiliating relegation. It was hard enough to cope with the Canary contrasts from one season to the next but now the mood swings are almost weekly.
On two of the last three Saturdays, City have picked up proper Championship wins at Carrow Road. They have deservedly seen off Stoke and then Birmingham without conceding a single goal. There have been enough moments of quality to suggest David Wagner’s squad is heading in the right direction and certainly well enough equipped for a tilt at the top six this season. Anyone who had just watched those two matches would feel quietly confident about what the rest of the campaign might bring.
They might be surprised to learn that in the 14 days between beating Stoke and Birmingham the Canaries lost three times. In one of those they conceded six goals in the Championship for only the second time in 50 years. Talismanic striker Ashley Barnes has also picked up an injury. The idea was for him to spend the season alongside Josh Sargent and he was again on Saturday. That partnership has sadly moved from the top of the pitch to the treatment room. They are comparing bruises rather than goal tallies.
In amongst all of this chaos is the remarkably cool-headed David Wagner. After Plymouth the metaphorical team sheet had been ripped up many, many times by supporters and reporters. So angry were those who watched open mouthed at Home Park that a few of the Canaries on duty that afternoon would be playing their final matches for the club if they had anything to do with it.
Yet when the actual team sheet was printed on Saturday it contained 10 of the 11 hammered so hopelessly seven days earlier. The goalkeeper and back four were completely unchanged. There was a minor tweak involving Jonathan Rowe moving inside and Przemyslaw Placheta getting a rare league start.
Wagner’s faith and commitment was repaid with a much more controlled performance. His insistence afterwards that he hadn’t been tempted to make wholesale changes because he “knew what went wrong” suggested that Norwich City have got a man in charge of a much less nervous disposition than those of us in the stands.
He seems just as unfazed by the post-Plymouth panic as he was when his new-look team started the season so impressively.
There is no doubt that room for improvement remains but it’s gone almost unnoticed that no team has scored more goals than the 19 Norwich City have managed in the first nine Championship games. Ipswich, Leicester and Sunderland all have 18 and the form they are in suggests that the Canaries’ position as league hot-shots may be short-lived.
Generally speaking, Wagner’s summer recruits have all settled in well but it’s interesting that nine of those 19 goals have come from two academy products who have been around the first team for quite some time. Rowe and Adam Idah are the club’s two top goal scorers two months into the season. Being a successful Norwich City head coach relies on improving players rather than just buying new ones all the time.
Last week I wrote that the Plymouth defeat was so bad it risked burning ‘almost all the bridges between the team and the supporters’. When that line was published on social media the first comment was “Almost destroyed? More like it has destroyed them.” The second suggested that if one heavy defeat causes that much damage we might as well give up.
Who knows how we’ll all be feeling next week?
Home comforts?
It’s time to plug in the Sat Nav, dig out the road atlas and stock up on travel sweets. Norwich City are on the road again.
Last week the yellow and green tour bus took us to Plymouth and Fulham, this week it’s days out in Swansea and Coventry. I was going to suggest that Judith Chalmers would have been proud of that sort of mileage but that would be unfair. Wish You Were Here used to take in more exotic locations than the ones on our itinerary.
Three away draws in the EFL Cup and the timing of the international breaks haven’t helped but it does feel like Norwich City are always away from home. “See you in three weeks,” said the steward on the door at Carrow Road on Saturday as he watched me put my knapsack on the end of a stick and head off into the sunset once more.
It’s got to the point that it feels like Take That play at the ground more often than Norwich City.
There are only two home games this month. Daniel Farke brings his Leeds United side to Norfolk on October 21st and then it’s Middlesbrough on Tuesday October 24th. So nothing for three weeks, then two matches in three days and then nothing until November 5th when they take on Blackburn in a match surprisingly moved to Sunday lunchtime for TV purposes.
In fact, season ticket holders at Carrow Road are getting just one Saturday 3pm kick-off between now and November 25th. We’d better just check that Gary Barlow hasn’t got it booked for that one.
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