Hopefully, that's that on the listless kids front. Teacher is now back in charge…

Tough this for anyone who shelled out decent money to go to Brentford last night, but The Boys being The Boys I think the result was all-but inevitable.

As was a pretty flat trip to Exeter on Saturday.

Leave a team without a leader for, what, 96 hours and that’s the kind of performance – and result – you will get.

And here we stray into territory that will – rightly – infuriate every supporter. Because, quite rightly, they will say: ‘Look, they are professional players… they should play to their maximum whenever they pull on a Canary shirt… that’s why I bought a train ticket to Brentford… that’s why I renewed my season ticket… on the expectation that they will perform to their best… every time… no matter what…’

Doesn’t work.

Look around your own work-place this morning. And take your line manager out of the equation. What if he or she isn’t there? Isn’t peering over your shoulder every other hour; catching your eye from inside their office; ‘Has that be done yet…’ written across their face.

Look back at your time at school. When the teacher was off and in came the ’supply teacher’…

How would you say classroom application and discipline changed? For better? Or worse?

And footballers are no different. When a ship is all-but rudderless; when there is no-one with a firm hand on the tiller; when the boys know that Black Sport has already been delivered to the lad bellowing orders from the touchline, standards slip; attention wanes; interest fades.

It’s wrong. Quite right.

It shouldn’t happen. Quite right.

But it does. Ask Jim Duffy.

Which is one, big reason that David McNally and Co deserve fair praise for the surgical manner in which they dug Paul Lambert out of Colchester United in the space of 72 hours…

From that very first phone-call into Us chairman Robbie Cowling at 5.30pm on Saturday night through to Lambert’s arrival in front of the Press at 10am yesterday morning, someone wasn’t taking ‘No!’ for an answer; someone was making a move happen. Whether or not one or two parties wanted it to happen.

And this is a break from tradition. A very big break from tradition. Because certain aspects to events of the last week weren’t nice.

The disposal of Bryan Gunn wasn’t nice. In fact, it was pretty nasty. And the manner in which the Canaries muscled their way into Essex, played the ‘We’re a big club…’ card and ruffled all manner of feathers as Lambert, his No2 Ian Culverhouse and their ‘director of football operations’ Gary Karsa all resigned en masse on Monday night as part of the ‘game’ that was being played is something – you strongly suspect – would never have happened under previous regimes.

Norwich would have been too nice.

And Norwich would have spent the next five or six games, ‘doing a Brentford’ as opposed to just the two.

Lambert will be in the chair for the Wycombe game; he’ll be giving it the big stare from the touchline having had three days looking into the whites of peoples’ eyes at training. At which point, teacher’s back…

He is an intriguing appointment. Talk to one or two people who have seen the new City chief at work and there is a bit of the Martins about him.

The clue came in the language. Asked whether it was funny that he, too, had now gone from Wycombe to Norwich – albeit with a stop at Colchester in-between – and the respect and the knowledge was obvious; that O’Neill had done much to shape Lambert the man and the manager in their trophy-laden spell at Celtic Park together.

“Yes, but ‘The Gaffer’ only stayed here, for what? 90 odd days – or whatever it was,” said Lambert. O’Neill was still ‘The Gaffer’. Not Martin. And he knew of his short-lived spell in Norfolk as then-chairman Robert Chase won a fearsome battle of wills and left O’Neill with little or no choice but to walk out on a contract for the first time in his footballing life.

“I never call him by his name – no. He’s still ‘The Gaffer’,” Lambert explained. “It’s strange how things work out like that, but he’s probably one of the best managers that I’ve worked under.”

What will be interesting to see is whether Culverhouse plays the Steve Walford in the set-up; bearing the brunt of the coaching duties with O’Neill-Lambert adding the stare, the comment, the tweak… O’Neill also had John Robertson to act as his eyes and ears; to be more than the court jester, but to float about the place and add something else to the chemistry.

Where Karsa ‘fits’ is a moot point; whether Norwich will find themselves with a new ‘football operations manager’ by the time this day is out is interesting; als, Butterworth’s card is marked.

He was, in all likelihood, a dead man walking into that dressing room at Griffin Park last night. And everyone knew it.

It’ll need Lambert to kick-start the Canaries back into life. Starting at Carrow Road this Saturday…