Edward Couzens-Lake

I was lucky enough to spend time in the company of Kevin Bond not so long ago. Much of the talk was, naturally enough, about his father. And I wasn’t particularly surprised when he said to me in the course of our conversation, “…we never did much defensive training under Dad”.

Luton paid Norwich a very decent sum for Cameron McGeehan’s services last year and, with him now attracting more than serious attention from a number of Championship sides, Norwich will, when he does move on again, benefit again by the sell-on fee that will almost certainly have been included as part of the deal.

The obvious question that I and, as it turned out, i journalist, Huge Godwin wanted to ask Lansdown was why, or when, he intended to just follow the oligarch lead and buy success – in this case, for his rugby club by also, by definition, for the football club as well?

Hansbury, unlike Theoklitos, stuck around and stuck it out, despite his nightmare debut. And it paid off for him. He ended his Norwich career having made 84 senior appearances for the club.

There are plenty of professional footballers out there who dislike the game and the entire industry with a very high degree of passion. They do it because it’s their job and they have been fortunate enough to be rather good at doing it.

No wonder Alex Neil smiles whenever he is asked about him. He knows Godfrey could go on to be a special player, one who already, in his own mind at least, will be convinced he is ready for a run in the Norwich City first-team this season.

“Whatever else people might have thought of Reid, he is still one of only two managers to have won a major trophy with the Canaries, an achievement that has eluded many of the more famous names that have followed him at the club…

Sheffield Wednesday then. A “proper” football club. It’s a term I often use in conversation about the game without really knowing quite what I mean by it. A mix, I suppose, of the club in questions history, their ground and the many and varying other ingredients that make up the whole football club package. You […]

McCormack’s overall record at Fulham is 100 appearances with 42 goals scored. An overall record of 2.38 games per goal. Now that’s not bad, not bad at all, but it does reflect these occasional purple patches he has had in his career, notably last season and 2008/09.

Norwich’s pre-season campaign had consisted of just one match; a 1-1 draw up at St Mirren on August 4, in the Paisley Charity Cup. We took them on again during pre-season two years later, that game ending in a 0-0 draw with, on both occasions, the trophy being shared between the two clubs. No penalty shoot outs then!

Hal Robson-Kanu thrived. The man without a club scored twice and made a real impact for both his country and on the footballing public at large, scoring, against Belgium, one of the best goals of the tournament.

It says a lot for the Norwich board’s opinion of Saunders that little effort seems to have been made to appease him or get him to change his mind. In truth, maybe each knew that they had gone as far with the other as they could, and this sudden break was just what was needed; a decisive action that suited both parties.

Bond was not afraid of big name players, nor those who had a similarly big reputation in the game. He’d already brought Martin Peters to the club as well as signing Peter Osgood on loan as well as having attempts to sign both Alan Ball and Bobby Moore as players thwarted.

One forward gone, one rumoured to be going? Boyer eventually sign for Southampton albeit a year after Ted had gone the same way. He might have gone earlier had it not been for an injury that meant he missed half of Norwich’s 1976/77 season anyway, the 21 league appearances he did make seeing a return of just five goals.

The Canaries had reached the final of the League Cup in 1973 and 1975 and had only missed out on doing so in the same competition in 1974 by narrowly losing to Wolves in the two legged semi-final. A third Wembley visit in four seasons didn’t seem a particularly unreasonable or unrealistic expectation.

We all travelled down to witness the FA Cup tie at Paulton Rovers blissfully unaware that the club was as close to going out of existence as it had been at any time in its history.

You can ring around on a Friday afternoon and have someone in and ready to do just that the following Monday morning. Not quite so easy to do when you’re looking for a new CEO though, especially if there are contracts involved and notice periods to serve.

With us return to Championship level football again, a lot of hope and expectation is being pinned on some of the leading lights of our FA Youth Cup winning side, not least the Murphy twins.

One thing is for certain and that is, unlike the season just gone, you couldn’t necessarily point a finger at deficiencies in the Canaries defence. We conceded just 76 goals in that campaign.

Britain was still a nation where the notion of ‘Derring-do’ was still in vogue, and, having talked the talk, Pilch set about walking the not inconsiderable walk required to make things happen.