You're stuck in the proverbial mire, you've taken just eight points from your opening nine league games, you haven't scored in almost eight hours of football and you're currently in one of the relegation places.
So how did the Canaries react to the alarming situation that they'd put themselves in as a result of an abysmal start to the campaign?
Did they, for instance, dig deep in the manner a boxer would who is on the ropes and one punch away from being k.o'd, but whose pride and sheer will-to-survive would rather see him being carried out of the ring on a stretcher than quit on his feet?
Did they give it absolutely everything as though literally everything depended on it?
Now had they done so, we would have at least been offered a few crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that it mattered to them, and might possibly even have forgiven them another defeat, much in the manner that a sizable portion of the Carrow Road crowd did when City failed to beat Scunthorpe at home last Tuesday and slipped into the bottom three.
But sadly the answer to the above question isn't the one that we might have been hoping for, because City were simply dreadful again at Loftus Road last night.
Think of the debacle at Molineux a few weeks ago – which has rightly since been recognised a watershed performance from City – and you throw this one in alongside it, because the Canaries offered very little in terms of a desire to take the game to their opponents, even less in terms of actual quality when they were in possession of the ball, and zilch in front of goal.
And this, as if anyone needed reminding, was against the team sitting rock bottom in the table, having not won one single game so far this season and who had shipped in no less than nine goals in their previous two games.
?Yet managerless Q.P.R were hardly called upon to perform any noteworthy defending last night while looking like Brazil at times when they were going forward in the second half.
If it had indeed been a boxing match, the referee would have had to be thinking of stopping it on compassionate grounds midway through the second half considering that one of the combatants wasn't really offering up any real resistance.
Only the fact that Q.P.R are a team that still seem destined for a spell in League One next season prevented a one-nil scoreline becoming three, four or five last night, because with a little more composure in front of goal ? and David Marshall not playing as well as he did ? they would have enjoyed a rout.
It all emphatically put the Canaries to shame.
As we know, one man will ultimately pay the price if decisions have to be made, but this woeful display last night and those in three-quarters of the other games this season aren't solely attributable to the failings of just one man.
It does, however, go without saying that something is badly amiss at the club right now, because it simply doesn't make sense why a squad comprising the diversity of talents that is present in the Norwich team this season is performing so very, very badly.
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