Well, where do you start? For the third game running, Norwich played OK.
We knocked the ball about, no-one had a bad game, we even created some chances. And yet, once again, we failed to score, and so now find ourselves stuck in the bottom three.
This time, at least, we were spared the sucker punch, but the feeling remains: we are a team with something – call it an x-factor, a cutting edge, a sense of belief – missing from its core.
Before trying to reason this, can we take any positives from last night?
Stan, with his glass half-full, can suggest a few – just to try and keep our spirits up. First, we look like a team that is not working rather than one that has been shattered to bits. Only at Wolves was there a complete case of collapse.
For the most part, too much tinkering, a lack of coherency and consistency of approach has meant we play like a team malfunctioning and uncertain.
Against Scunthorpe, the simpler formation and game plan gave a certain clarity to City's performance, and made it something of an injustice that the goal did not come.
Second, Murray looks like a very good centre-back. He is more composed than either Shacks or Doc, and reads the game very well. If he lacks a little height and bulk, then he makes up for it in guile and proficiency.
Third, Hucks looked more his old self; the commitment and the fire were back; he looked like he wanted to play for us again. Finally, the kids are alright.
Jarvis (as with Spillane previously) had another decent game, and Martin made a difference when he came on.
Where Cureton likes to drop off, find a space and wait for the ball, Martin gets stuck in and tries to carve something out for himself – and how close he came. Surely, he will start with Dion on Monday?
And yet, however much Stan tries to clutch at straws, we are in something of a crisis. We are in the relegation zone, our players lack confidence, the manager seems uncertain of his preferred system and starting eleven.
Stan – knowing this to be controversial – still thinks Granty has assembled a more balanced (and so potentially better) squad than the one he inherited.
But it is a squad that has yet to gel, and in which a sense of urgency and belief is clearly missing. As such, for us to improve and move on up the table, something has got to change; something has got to fire up the team and get the players believing in themselves and each other.
To do this, Stan sees two options. The first is to get in a coach to take over the man-management side of things that Granty obviously struggles with. Quite how we are a fifth of the way through the season without having replaced Hunter, Stan finds quite amazing.
Nevertheless, a counterweight to the Grant/Duffy axis of fire-and-brimstone is surely needed. A new coach may, too, help Grant clarify in his own mind just what he wants his team to do; or at least communicate it more effectively to the players.
Perhaps a new voice at Colney, a fresh pair of eyes and a somehow softer personality will help inject that elusive 'something' back into the Canaries?
Second, and more dramatic, is to call time on Grant and bring in a new management team. In Stan's mind, Grant has demonstrated why he was well regarded as a coach.
He thinks about the game, appreciates and aspires to technical competence in his players, works hard and is committed. He's an honest man who wants the best for Norwich City.
But managing is something else. Grant's approach verges on virtual football, whereby players and their abilities are measured in co-ordinates, and in which elaborate tactics and game-plans are almost computer-generated and scientifically reasoned.
What is missing is the human element; that out there at Carrow Road are a bunch of blokes who sometimes make mistakes, who would no doubt like some consistency in their work (and who they play alongside), and who want to know from one day to the next just how Norwich City are going to play football.
Grant's FIFA-training-school approach (like Worthy in the Premiership) seems to over complicate what is at base a simple game. It also downplays the fact that good teams are built on a sense of camaraderie and confidence.
The manager's job is to instil that. If he is unable to, then it is time to change. Over to you, Sharon…
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