Mick Dennis

Tin hat time for me: here is my defence of Rupert Murdoch. No, that’s not really what this is. But I’d like to respond to and amplify Gary Gowers’ piece about the start of the Premier League — because I had a ringside seat at the fight that transformed the game in this country. Several […]

It’s only a game. Football paid off my mortgage. Football helped me regain my mental health more than once. Football has set my mood and provided the rhythm of my week since I was eight – which is 60 years ago this week. But it is only a game. So that is the context of […]

Eddie Baily, West Ham’s chief scout, kept up a constant chorus of insistent instructions from the touchline. Everyone in the stadium heard every word. Unfortunately, every second word was an expletive. But, as the attendance was less than 300, Baily’s bawling didn’t offend too many. It was Wednesday, October 1st, 1980. West Ham’s European Cup […]

Here are some comments from Twitter. All very recent. All genuine. All entirely predictable. “As things stand, our beloved old club is not rich enough to succeed in the modern game.” “It’s the owners’ fault. You could stick any manager in, and we would still be getting the same issues time and time again: lack […]

VAR. I hate it. It is ludicrous that officials are determining offside by the position of an atom at the edge of a toenail, the furthermost tip of a hair, or some other nanoscopic extremity. Ruling out Teemu Pukki’s goal against Spurs, and rendering Mario Vrancic’s sublime pass irrelevant, was crushingly dispiriting. But I wasn’t […]

Two anecdotes say a lot about Martin Peters. Both require you to understand what the world was like more than forty years ago, when the A17 was even worse than now and when the coach carrying Norwich City to overnight hotels before away games rarely got out of low gears for long, winding stretches of […]

Today we said goodbye to one of the greats. One of our greats. And it’s fitting that his final journey included a funeral service at Carrow Road. Mick Dennis, who was a reporter on the Pink Un when Duncan Forbes was in his pomp, was asked by the family to give a eulogy, an honour […]

Back in October 2013, when Big Dunc’s diagnosis was first made public, our own Mick Dennis wrote a moving piece that captured perfectly the inextricable link between Duncan Forbes and Norwich City Football Club.  Dunc was many things to many different people: fearless centre-back… warrior leader… wise old head… mentor… Mr Club Cabbage… and friend. […]

Everyone with a Twitter account agrees about the expulsion of Bury Town from the Football League. Something must be done! Fans, MPs and journalists want: tougher rules about club owners more monitoring to stop clubs being run badly spread the money around more fairly oh, and an independent inquiry and, um, give more power to […]

Norwich City: W25, D13, L6. Sheff Utd: W25, D10, L9. Leeds Utd: W25, D7, L12. It is City’s draws that are taking them up. Effectively Daniel Farke’s cut-price heroes have drawn six games that Leeds lost. The very first match of the season set the tone. At St Andrew’s, Birmingham scored in the 89th minute […]

Delia Smith turned to Paul Lambert after they had watched Norwich City’s dismal defeat at Brentford and gave him a blunt, five-word summation of the task he had accepted a few hours previously. It was Wednesday, 19 August, 2009. Lambert became Norwich manager that day, but too late for him to play any significant part […]

The most dismal week of the 2,340 odd that I have spent caring too much about Norwich City was in 2013, as October became November. On the Tuesday night, the lovely Mrs Dennis and I watched a 4-0 League Cup defeat at Old Trafford. Four days later we sampled the delights of the M1, M6 […]

Which is your favourite of the three best Norwich goals so far this season? The 18-pass move against Villa? City’s third goal in the romp at Hillsborough? Or the 97th-minute winner against Millwall? Those three exquisite moves all extoll the boldness and belief that is surging through the club we care about. And each of […]

Graham Poll was refereeing an evening game at Everton. When he arrived at Goodison, long before kick-off, he headed straight out onto the pitch; part of his pre-match ritual was always to take an early look at the playing surface and re-familiarise himself with the layout of the stands, the tunnel, the dug-outs and so-on. […]

Belatedly, I must both thank and blame Huw, the Welsh lothario with whom I shared a flat on Thorpe Road in Norwich — in the days shortly after cave paintings. When Huw moved out, he took his record player with him, and the three of us who were left as tenants — me and two […]

Paul Lambert unwittingly provided a pithy summary of the Wes Hoolahan conundrum long before either of them had any connection with Norwich City. Lambert signed the mercurial midfielder for Scottish club Livingston in January 2006 — a controversial deal, marked by insults — and said: “He’s got a great left foot, and he’s a clever […]

A true tragedy in the NCFC “family” has surely reminded us all that football is just a sport. This might not be the place to talk about such things, but I can’t consider much else at the moment; the death of Simon Thomas’s wife, Gemma, at 40, just three days after her Leukaemia was diagnosed, […]

Part of the fun of compiling Tales From The City books comes when two or more contributors give accounts of the same events or deal with the same subject. Together they provide a much more complete picture. When I was editing Tales 3, for instance, I realised that Terry Allcock, Dion Dublin and Gary Doherty […]

The stirring victory at Sheffield United was followed by their supporters abusing Norwich directors, assaulting our fans and tweeting incendiary messages. I’ve reported the worst Tweets to South Yorkshire Police. And, as the Yellow Army mustered three days later at Brentford — where the only danger was that those of us in the upper tier […]

It was just a pub meal: a group of colleagues dining together, along with two of their partners and a couple of friends. Norwich fans who saw the happy group at the big table at The Crabtree, in Fulham on Saturday night, took very little notice. But every Fulham supporter who walked past did a […]