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There is only one word for it. Awful. Just, well, awful.

16th January 2008 By theexpert Leave a Comment

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After being virtually assured early yesterday morning that there was precious little chance that the game would go ahead due to the state of the pitch, only to be informed a couple of hours later that it definitely was, I can't deny that it was difficult to suppress the feeling before kick-off last night that we really shouldn't have been present at Gigg Lane.

Not solely as a result of the weather mind, but particularly so when you consider the manner in which the Canaries had underperformed against their League Two opponents ten days ago – only to deliver precisely the opposite at Barnsley in their very next match.

Anything remotely approaching that terrific attacking display evident in the second-half at Barnsley in the original tie and we'd all have been stretched out on the sofa last night content with a trip to St.Mary's already in the bag, and watching the scores roll in of the other teams battling it out for a place in the fourth round rather than shivering in the driving rain and gloomy surroundings at Gigg Lane.

Likewise, anything remotely approaching the standards from Barnsley at Bury last night and City wouldn't have been dumped out of the cup in the embarrassing manner they were.

It was awful. No other word for it. Bury fully deserved their victory, no two ways about it.

They simply set their stall out again in the manner they did at Carrow Road by getting men behind the ball at all times and asked the Canaries to try to break them down. And the simple fact of the matter was that City didn't have the foggiest idea of how to do it.

Norwich not only lacked ideas and invention for virtually all of the 90 minutes, but they also couldn't for the life of them pass the ball to each other. And the 800 or so travelling City fans could easily have been forgiven for thinking that they'd turned up at the wrong ground considering that the team they had seen destroy Barnsley four days earlier was now completely unrecognisable from the one that was failing so miserably in front of their very eyes.

By contrast, Bury seemed full of life and creation went they moved forward and they regularly had the City rearguard in serious trouble.

Indeed it would have been a travesty if Gary Doherty had managed to toe-poke the ball home at the back post deep into stoppage time to force the game into extra-time, because aside from a final five minutes or so of City getting up a head of steam and putting the ball into the Bury box, Jim Provett's goalmouth saw about as much action as did that of his fellow colleagues when the Canaries were racking up hour after hour of not scoring back in September and October.

There is valid reason for questioning Glenn Roeder's tinkering with the team again and not sending out a full-strength side, but by the same token, surely there was more than adequate quality and experience in the starting line-up for City have performed infinitely better than this?

After all, if the likes of Marshall, Doherty, Shackell, Russell, Fotheringham, Pattison, Huckerby and Cureton can't take care of a woefully out-of-form League Two side, then would including Otsemobor, Camara, Croft and Dublin from the start really have made all that much difference?

And one of the most worrying things of all last night is that no-one in a yellow shirt showed any apparent desire to stop the side from slipping deeper and deeper into the mire either, and that just simply isn't the Norwich that we have now become used to under Roeder.

Even the manager himself couldn't work his magic at half-time in the manner he did at Oakwell on Saturday when the Canaries were similarly struggling to find and rhythm or cohesion to their game, because despite introducing all three of his substitutes at various stages of the second-half, it barley altered anything at all.

At least Roeder was honest enough afterwards to admit that he could offer no excuses at all, but he did promise that City would come out with all guns blazing against Leicester on Saturday in order to try to put things right.

Let's hope so, because they certainly didn't turn up last night.


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