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Naaaaarch

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  1. Got our new sporting director in a few weeks ago, he's supposedly assessing before making any big calls. We really should have been rid before the last international break but instead of that Delia Smith called him to give him her support, essentially undermining the incoming sporting director. We'll be getting spanked by Ipswich in a couple of weeks, I would imagine Ben Knapper's plan will be just about complete by then.
  2. Omobamidele would have absolutely been better fit with how we try to play out from the back but it's pretty obvious he was sold to fill a hole in finances. He'd also have still been suffering from the midfield tactics. Wagner's midfield pairing essentially need to do everything and none of our midfielders are that complete. None of our midfielders have a shred of defensive instinct (well maybe Foreshaw did but his legs went years ago). It basically results in out best attacking midfielder (Sara) getting pressed on the edge of his own area. Our fullbacks play high up the pitch so if we lose it in the middle we're essentially giving the opposition an overload against a pairing made of our not so mobile central defenders (Duffy, Gibson, Hanley, Batth). Duffy is pretty much what you get at Championship level, he's limited in a lot of ways and has the odd moment of madness but he's actually quite solid and dominant in the air.. He was a key performer in our run at the beginning of the season where we only lost 1 in 8. Wagner has complained about an injury crisis although I don't really think it's been that bad. He's just not found a way to play without Josh Sargent and he's very set in his ways when it comes to that midfield build up.
  3. We threw away our identity in the last Premier League season and have half-arsed trying to put together a new one ever since. We were clearly trying to put together a more physical squad but if you look at our central midfield position (Sara, McLean, Gibbs, Nunez, Sorensen and Foreshaw) it's clear we're not fully committing. We've been really complacent over the last couple of seasons, it's like the club just assumed we'd get promoted because it's Norwich in the Championship. We really did stray from the original Webber/Farke squad building mentality though. I think we'll have 12 or 13 30+ players by the beginning of 2024. Our new sporting director started yesterday so hopefully that can be the reset we need. Although our recent accounts show that we don't exactly have the money for a dramatic rebuild. I honestly have no idea if we'll be challenging again any time soon. Will be interesting to see how Ben Knapper sees football, coming from a long stint at Arsenal I'm hoping we'll be a footballing side again. We also have an ownership change on the horizon so we'll hopefully be more financially competitive going forward.
  4. He has some history with our new sporting director. It's happening, we're the mid table championship gig of his dreams.
  5. Unsurprisingly the new Sporting Director's holiday has been cut short, he now starts next Monday. Looking forward to seeing what he's all about, hopefully he's got a strong idea about what he wants on the pitch, like the Stuart Webber of 5 or 6 years ago. Assume he'll sack the manager and be looking to appoint one over the break, granted I'd be shocked if he hadn't been on that for weeks already. I don't really buy the 'well with that squad of course they're where they are' mentality. I think there are probably 3 squads in the division that are significantly stronger than the rest and then there's a massive group of clubs at a similar level. Are Ipswich, West Brom and Preston's squads in the top 6 on pure squad strength or do they have strong management building strong foundations and a strong mentality? The largest flaw in our squad is that we don't have a second Josh Sargent, somebody that can really lead the line in Wagner's setup. There's no surprise that we've spiraled ever since and as I'm sure you've all seen first hand a lot of okay players become bad players when things aren't going well. Anyway, reset button about to be hit. Exciting times, hopefully.
  6. Wagner is not good but the problems here are well above his head. This will likely be the end for Wagner but hopefully it can also fastrack some of the other more important changes we've got coming.
  7. Probably somebody else or you're thinking of weirdos on twitter. I've seen more Villa fans referencing Norwich fans making comments like that than Norwich fans actually making the comments. Of course I've seen far worse comments from Norwich fans in regards to Ramsey but that was only after it went full panto after he left. Smith 'not appreciating' players like Cantwell certainly sounds like something straight off a Fifa playing teenager's twitter account. There absolutely was hope (but not expectation) that the Dean Smith man management we'd heard so much would be able to drag Cantwell back up to the levels he was at previously. It was obvious from pretty early on that it was not going to be like that though. 95% of my personal frustration with Smith was team selection in that front 4, I must admit. I get that he wanted to make us more physical but when your physical options on the wings are Hernandez (awful) and Sargent (really not a winger) it just didn't make sense. Especially when his preferred striking option was Teemu Pukki, a player in need of a very specific type of service. If he'd been willing to adapt for a season I think there's a good chance he'd still be here now. Similarly if Pukki was sold replaced with an actual decent physical wing option.
  8. He got that for a couple of weeks from a few vocal ones on the internet but it was obvious within a few weeks that he was a decent little player. Most of the nastiness towards him was after his departure and whilst I don't agree with it you can't say it didn't look suspicious. The loan is cancelled just after Smith leaves based on the fact he's going to be out injured for months. He'd have gone home to Villa to get his injury tested. He turns up at a Boro, a club with another former Villa staffer, less than a month later. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but if I was Villa i'd 100% have overstated that injury to get him out to club in less of a mess than our own. Will probably be a long and painful and long race to the Premier League if we were to go head to head with Deano now. We're almost certainly going to need a big rebuild and Smith is not going to get a side that's anywhere near challenging. I'm somewhat surprised at how cheaply you let Ramsey go for, although I guess it's hard to turn down £15m if you don't see him in your team any time soon. He had a really good natural ability to find space and he was excellent at using his body to maneuvering away from people/win fouls. He was fairly bright and efficient when it came to using the ball and still has time to grow out physically. Another season in the Championship is probably what I'd have given him, hell I'd take him on loan from Burnley in January. Build some bridges, heal the world.
  9. Ahhh Brandon Williams. He got some stick after a game at West Ham and then went home and gave some back on instagram in the form of posting a picture of his middle finger. Then went into full damage control afterwards posting a picture of his dog and implying that people followed him home and that's what the middle finger was about. I don't think people followed him from London to his Suffolk home and if they did I would have thought he'd be going to the police and not Instagram. A majority of Norwich fans actually liked WIlliams, he was one of the few that showed some passion on the pitch that season. There's even a slightly cringe enduing image of some Norwich fans with a 'Please stay, Brandon' banner. Could some weirdo have followed him home? Sure. is it more likely that a man that would wear his own initials on a chain is just a bit of a w? I think so.
  10. We've got a new sporting director lined up but he doesn't start officially until the end of next month. He's a guy who's been at Arsenal across various roles for the last 13 years and has a strong background in the statistics side of the game. His appointment is one of the few things the club have done recently that actually does make a lot of sense. Power at the top of the club is also (slowly) shifting from Delia and MWJ to the new American owners. Mark Attanasio made his money running an asset management company and is the owner of a MLB team so I'm sure you can see why this appointment makes sense. I wouldn't say it feels like the post Worthington era quite yet but there is certainly a sense of deja vu about the club right now. Ironically it's feeling very similar to the club that Stuart Webber inherited back in the summer of 2017. A squad full of aging Championship pros with big contracts and recent experience at not being good enough for the Premier League. That second Premier League transfer window where he wasted significant money (Rashica, Tzolis, Gibson, Normann, Kabak, Gilmour ect) has seemingly scarred him and he's been chasing his losses ever since. That second relegation is absolutely the point where we should have parted company with Webber and that isn't even a case of hindsight being 20/20. The Roeder era was something else entirely. He'd shove a club icon like Darren Huckerby out the back door and then bring in 15 useless loanees from the Premier League over the course of one season. In terms of attitude around the club he actually felt a lot like Dean Smith (not something people on here will believe, I'm sure). Obviously Roeder was nastier about it but they both very clearly gave of a feeling of being too big for the club and not really wanting to be here. Of course Roeder had just been managing West Ham and Newcastle and Smith has just left your lot. I've been watching since the Worthington era and Hughton is the only successful(ish) 'name' manager we've had. Obviously Lambert was a name but that was only as a player. We are really in a weird transitional period right now at pretty much every level of the club.
  11. Town's current success is certainly rubbing salt into the wounds. Frustratingly a lot of the things they've been getting right off the pitch are things we stopped doing about 3 years ago. Safe to say they aren't spending £3m on a 30 year old who's never played out of the Swiss league and only got the move because he was with the manager at a previous club. That reset on our horizon can't come soon enough.
  12. It's been about 3 years to forget.
  13. Idah's one of those players that has all the physical attributes but can't put it together with the mental side of the game. He's always a few seconds behind where he needs to be. Our big failure with him is probably not loaning him out to a club where he can be the lead striker for a season earlier in his career. He's never really had a significant run of games here. He's also had a few injuries along the way that have scuppered any momentum and confidence. Could certainly see him being a late bloomer, probably once we've given up on him. A good recent example of that would be Carlton Morris. 20+ in the Champs last year and already a few this season.
  14. Yeah. The question when Josh Sargent got injured was can Wagner find a way to stay competitive without him. I think 1 win in 8 is the answer to that. Still take him over Deano though. We added a bunch of experience to the squad in order to avoid this type of mental breakdown but it's obviously not worked. At least we have the likes of Sara, Rowe and Sargent to pay off that Stuart Webber failure. Oh well, big changes on the horizon at the top of the club with a new sporting director coming in next month and the American owners will be majority shareholders soon (I'm sure Delia and MWJ will find a way to linger a couple more years).
  15. Yup, footballing opinions don't matter in times like this. Get wells soon CS.
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