Martin Penney

The King is dead – long live the King! Well, that’s how it feels to me just now as one of the best World Cups I can recall comes to an end – and I’ve lived through 15 of them, even though I remain totally oblivious to events in Chile in 1962. I was only […]

I think it was only two weeks ago that I made the rash statement in a comment on MFW that whoever was coming into NCFC, I wouldn’t have heard of them. It was my bad because that remark was off the cuff and turned out to be untrue. I’m surely excused Moritz Leitner. I’m absolutely […]

‘Positive recruitment leads to positive policing’. I was sat in a hot as hell office in New Scotland Yard as PC Tony De Souza and I knocked out a press release. That phrase meant nothing to me but after I’d grudgingly agreed it could be the intro and our “jackets” were off, Tony and I decamped […]

I go back a heck of a long way with Norwich City transfers out. At 60 years of age I guess that’s only natural. I was gutted when Flecky was sold and really disembowelled when Mr Chase dispatched Chris Sutton through the door to Blackburn for £5 million despite his pre-sale denials. Similarly, I did not want […]

The Romans were well clued up. Even Monty Python acknowledged that. They had a double-headed God called Janus, a household deity who was capable of both good and evil. Which neatly brings me to the sale of Mr Joshua Murphy. No messing around, to get ten million quid for him is brilliant. A great sale […]

MFW MUSIC WEEK – the week that thinks it’s a fortnight. Our writers have thoroughly enjoyed it and luckily so have many of our readers. We have had some fantastic comments from all you lovely posters and covered so much of the musical spectrum it’s incredible. So, I guess the first thing to say is […]

So… given the propensity of the MFW comments to scoot off in a musical direction, we thought it worth filling some of the close season voids with some musical thoughts of the team. First up, the one and only Mr P… *** The Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Small Faces, Hendrix, Cream and the […]

One of the most hackneyed phrases in football is “they’re on the beach”. Directed at any side with nothing to play for at the end of a season, it’s assumed minds are elsewhere, wishing the bodies were too. And Good Lord we were the prime example of it the other Sunday at Hillsborough. Supporters wear […]

When I read Gary’s article on Wednesday the memories all came flooding back. They were the glory days and let nobody ever tell you any different. I’d seen Spurs thrash Club Brugge 3-0 at White Lane in the 1980s but that had been the only UEFA Cup match I’d ever witnessed. Until… I remember that final […]

“So, what we gonna do now?”. Then the drums come in with that fantastic tick-tock beat from Nicky Headon. It was called Clampdown and on London Calling by The Clash. The next line was “Taking off his turban they said is this man a Jew?” Joe Strummer in full angst-driven flight and the musicians in the band […]

When I was about six or seven my parents took a holiday to Jersey and unusually let me accompany them. For once I wasn’t dispatched to Grandma’s in salubrious Forest Gate. On the last morning, Dad decided he’d buy me my first watch – a Timex. It was like getting your first Action Man, some […]

Preston North End 0, Norwich City 0. Oh well, that’s the end of my match report. Alex Neil can hardly make the playoffs now, but I derive no satisfaction from that. Like many of us I suspect, I bear him and PNE no ill-will. The candle of their season burned considerably longer than ours and […]

We all know what a Neil Warnock side is like. Many of us have seen enough of those over the years and know exactly what to expect. And on Saturday we were not “disappointed”. They will bark, b*ll*ck and bite, and orchestrate themselves to take it in turns to snuff out any skilful approach play […]

With four games left to go (yes, just four) I’ve noticed something quite uplifting – a statistic that cheers me immensely. After what was apparently a crazy game on Tuesday night at Sunderland complete with Fog on The Tyne (sorry, Wear), Ivo Pinto’s last-gasp strike means that still, as of April 12, no side has […]

I used to drink in, and briefly worked in, one of the best-known pubs in Broadland. As you entered the establishment the first thing you saw on the wall was a massive, framed illustration of two early Victorian railway engineers staring up at a broken aqueduct with the equivalent of Puffing Billy falling through the […]

One thing I have always almost perversely prided myself upon is that as either as a player or a supporter I have never really, deep down minded too much about losing to a better team. Defeat still rankles but sometimes you just have to take it on the chin, as I did on Friday. As […]

Boxing is heavily engrained in my DNA. While I cannot punch my way out of the proverbial wet brown paper bag, my dad Len was Royal Engineers middleweight champion either twice or thrice (depending on how many lagers he’d had when recounting the tale) and boxed for the Army against the Navy more than once. […]

When you walk something like three miles to the theatre of pipedreams on a cob-freezing day, eventually take your seat and realise a couple of your mates and several of your acquaintances haven’t managed to attend for various (unknown but hopefully solely weather-related) reasons, the least you expect is to be entertained by events on […]