I’m sure I’m not the only Canary fan who is absolutely delighted with the way we have started this season. For various reasons (damn university…) I wasn’t at the game against the Addicks but I have been to the majority of the first 11 (including Shrewsbury) league and cup games this season.
Shrewsbury away was an appalling performance but I only paid £7.50 for a match ticket and I was ‘lucky’ enough to be at the derby day victory so I won’t complain too much. Swings and roundabouts.
When I first became a Norwich City supporter, Nigel Worthington was manager. The response to relegation from the top tier then compared to how Neil Adams has helped us to react to the drop this time could not be any more different.
On both occasions we had the relegation ‘prize’ money from the Premier League and we also had the tag of promotion favourites.
However this season City have taken to the Championship brilliantly. Keeping our best players like John Ruddy, Martin Olsson and Nathan Redmond have certainly helped in that respect. I felt last year (and I’m not the only one) that we had the squad to stay up but, for whatever reason, it didn’t quite work out.
I really believe the squad we have is the best in the league.
Is there a better goalkeeper than Ruddy?
Is there a better left back than Olsson?
Is there a….. well you get the idea.
Adams has done very well to get the team performing how we should ‘expect’ them to perform. Given the criticism the club received (from me included) for his appointment he has done well to shut the critics up and get us to top of the league at this early stage.
There have been some negatives for sure: Wolves and Shrewsbury, giving teams a head start in some very average (at best) first half displays, conceding some sloppy goals and failing to take some good chances against Charlton. But the Championship is never a straightforward league.
They say that the 10 game mark is a good stage at which to judge how a team has started. Could it have gone much better than being top of the league after 10 games?
After that first game at Wolves I was feeling pretty negative about all things Norwich City. We always start poorly and even taking into account the red card we were pretty dire. Neil disagreed – as we would have expected him to.
However since then his Norwich have hardly looked back. Let’s not let Charlton’s unlikely smash and grab detract from a great start.
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On the topic of expectation – why shouldn’t we expect to win this league? We’ve got arguably the best squad on paper and we’ve got a manager who seems to be getting the best out of the players. My confidence was further boosted when I caught up with a Nottingham Forest supporting friend of mine said that he and his fellow “tricky Trees” fans aren’t expecting them to keep up the pace with us and our “squad full of Premier League quality players – his words not mine!
I really don’t fear anybody in this league – we’ve played the likes of Wolves, Cardiff and Watford who are right up there. There will be the odd surprise package as always but we should be expecting to finish in the automatic promotion spaces.
It’s not arrogance – it’s what we should be aiming for. I’m sure Neil is.
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I won’t have been the only person of yellow and green persuasion to be delighted to hear that Grant Holt has signed for Huddersfield Town on loan. The legend still has something to offer teams and I highly expect him to be a success.
Best of luck Holty!
NCFC should be where they are.The money the 3 relegated teams get, compared to the other 21 clubs makes a complete mockery of FFP.I am led to believe over £30 million, against less than £5 million, yes THAT REALLY IS FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY
Few of us expected to be top of the table at this point so that’s a great achievement but with just 3 points between us and 8th, this division is the closest it’s ever been. Forest and Wolves have gone off the boil so it’s wide open.
The home form is a worry as is first half goal tally – we can’t keep expecting the net to bulge in the second half of the second half of games as proved against Charlton.
Concerns – the contribution of Wes, the end product of Redmond and the imminent trip to Fulham – we never win there and they are on a roll.
Top two we´re aiming for, yes I agree
But to expect it, is more than risky,
We´ve seen many times before, arrogance
Coming back to bite those just too cocky,
One game at a time, each with due respect
Is the only way to win with effect,
For in this league the margins are not great
Between the losers and the two elect. OTBC
Neil – don’t cry, just hope your team get to the prem (whoever that is). We got there on less than a shoestring after all.
PS. George – are you ok?
Jimbo, you are missing my point completely.I am not crying, just stating that the FFP rules should be fair. When a team is promoted to the Prem. they are given a substantial amount of money to allow them to be at least competitive, yet a team promoted from the 1st division are given “peanuts” compared to certain others.How this is FFP is totally beyond me
Neil(1) – Ipswich by any chance?
I agree that pound for pound, we probably have the best squad but as Charlton/Birmingham showed, a well organised team with a plan (and luck) will present problems. Rotherham will certainly be another test of the faithful’s patience.
Marshall is maybe a better shot stopper than Ruddy but the latter’s exclusion again by Hodgson at Foster’s gain is bewildering.
Cheers to Holty for putting in 80 mins in Huddersfield’s win at Wolves.
I find it strange that Alan says Ipswich,that would be like me, a BOSTON Utd fan reading the lincoln pages.
FFP is absolutely no guarantee of success, after all how many ex premier league clubs are in the football league? It is ignorant and deliberately disingenuous to suggest that FFP makes any pretense that all clubs have equal income. All clubs are so obviously not equal. Some have large stadiums which they fill, with vast supporter bases, and huge revenue streams, some do not. To suggest that a well run comparatively big club should have the same revenues as a small badly run club is preposterous, and never the aim of FFP.
FFP is only about making clubs work within their means, it makes no statement on what those means are except in relation to sugar daddies’
OTBC looking forward to a full and rocking Carrow Road on Saturday
The parachute payments are a good idea but poorly executed. The idea is that a Prem club will have bills that would potentially cripple the club upon relegation, hence the parachute gives them a soft landing.
The irony is that often relegated clubs sell off a lot of their big name players, get the salary off the books and a get good transfer fee in. What then is the parachute covering? Essentially a chance at buying up a lot of good players in the league.
What would make more sense is if the parachute costs covered the day-to-day running of the club and all players wages who were at the club upon relegation, but teams couldn’t put it towards transfers of new players or new player wages. That should come from any transfer fees in.
Neil (1) (6) FFP is not about how prize money is distributed, it is about how clubs are externally funded. The point of it is to try to stop clubs borrowing excessively in relation to their turnover/profit and then going bust, and then failing to pay their creditors (many of whom will be local businesses, and probably fans to boot).
But in all honesty there has always been a gap between the top few and the rest. As long as I can remember Man C and Man U and Liverpool, Everton, Spurs and Arsenal have been among the richest clubs, Hartlepool, York and Exeter amongst the poorest – that was the case in the mid-60s when I first watched games and in many ways, despite everything, most of the big names then are the big names now. Of course there have been ups and downs and many of the smaller clubs of old have exited the league (some to return later).
What has changed is that if (say) Man U were badly managed for a few years, as they were post-Busby, they could before have gone down (and did, briefly). But now manage them badly and the worst they face is missing out on Europe.
Ironically FFP reinforces the status quo even more because the biggest clubs with the biggest revenue can borrow and spend more than those below them and there is no chance at all of even clubs with medium level support such as Villa or Newcastle ever breaking into their elite. That’s why they are so in favour of it.
That’s not to say the way the Premiership chooses to hand out its funds shouldn’t be questioned and indeed for a club like Rotherham who have never even been to the top division it must appear they are not on a level playing field. However they are one of very few that haven’t had the benefit of parachute payments – many of those receiving them in the past, ourselves included, have wasted them.
But there again if there were no parachute payments even more money would be retained by the elite who never get relegated, and those who do go down might well go out of business very quickly.
From time to time, ‘George’ sends in a rhyme,
His opinions on all things yellow and green,
While they appear not to rhyme all of the time,
To say that’s a crime would be very mean.
To clarify:
“That’s why they are so in favour of it” refers to the biggest (“elite”) clubs, not to Villa and Newcastle.
And I should also said made it clear that Rotherham are one of the few in the Championship not to have been in the Premiership.
Wish we could edit posts, include bold/italics/underline etc. on here. Any chance Rick?
The problem with your suggestion Dave B (10) is that you are in fact only referring to the situation in well run clubs, like City. For most clubs – and ourselves last time we were relegated – the parachute payments are covering a lot of debt accrued trying to stay up in the PL. Your suggestion effectively penalises the better run clubs, even if this season the fees from the players City sold probably did more than cover all the incoming players.
This is not to say there are not problems with the parachute payments and the whole inequity between the PL and the Football League. On that all I can say is thank goodness we are not Spain, even if that doesn’t solve any of the structural problems that we have.
Neil(8) – please accept my sincere apologies for suspecting you to be an Ipswich fan. It was crass and insensitive of me!
There must be a ‘proper’ league team you follow?
Alan,
just returned from a shocking 0-2 home defeat,we used to be a league team, refuse to be a glory hunter, hoping one day we will get back there.