The board are to blame for this pathetic shambles

I've been quite shocked by the number of posters, both here and elsewhere, who've pinned the responsibility for the miserable state of affairs at our club solely on our miserable, bedraggled manager. God knows, Nigel Worthington has run out of ideas, and is an unrecognisable shadow of the man who, when he became manager almost six years ago, immediately sought to cut through the complacency endemic at Carrow Road, and refused to stand for the kind of halfhearted excuses for a performance which we'd all become so sadly used to. But Delia and Michael's statement on Monday seems to have drawn the ire away from them - and in my view, it absolutely should not.

The truth is that Worthington should have been dismissed after our shambolic pair of defeats at Luton and QPR almost a year ago. Any other Championship club with even a modicum of ambition - and especially one which had just been relegated - wouldn't have even thought twice about such a move. It was obvious that the manager had gone stale, and the team had run out of the kind of brio and vitality which characterised our surge to the title in 2003/4. There would have been nothing wrong at all with the board simply saying: "Thanks for the memories Nigel: it's been a lot of fun at times, but things move on, and it's time for a change".

Instead, fallibly, disastrously, Delia and the board sat on their hands. There was never the slightest chance that the team would somehow recover past glories, and surge back into contention: as much as anything else, Worthington had lost the 100% commitment and belief in his methods of the players. When a manager has been at a club too long, players get bored of the same old ideas, the same old training routines: they, as much as anyone else, desperately needed a fresh start. But did the board give them one? No. Instead, in their spineless incompetence, they have done the one thing they literally could not afford to do: they have wasted more than a year of parachute payments, in vain support of a man whose time ran out long ago.

Let's be quite clear about this. If Norwich fail to win promotion this season, our best players will be released, and we'll have to start again from scratch. We'd be unlikely to be back in real contention until 2009/10 - and this at a time when the new Premiership TV deal means that the gap between the top flight and the Championship is rapidly turning from a gulf into a yawning chasm. Urgency of action was paramount were City not to miss the boat: yet the response of the board has been the exact opposite.

To make matters even worse, since the summer, it's been clear that those running our club have been hedging their bets: unwilling to give the manager much money to spend, and privately acknowledging that he was on borrowed time anyway. Which, in such a pivotal, critical season, is an absolutely absurd way in which to behave: you can only be 100% behind your manager, or if not, he must be dismissed. There is no in-between - and if he was indeed on 'borrowed time', why on earth was he still here in the first place?

Any board with even the slightest shred of competence would have ended the manager's stay in the summer - and allowed a new man to come in with his own signings, his own pre-season, his own ideas. Because inevitably, players are hardly likely to give their all when they know a change at the top is likely anyway. But instead, nine (soon to be ten) games have been wasted, and Norwich are already playing catch-up; and this even before the drawn-out process of finding a new manager (who will want his own coaching staff, and his own players) can begin.

It needn't have been like this. Had Delia and Michael learnt anything from the Hamilton saga six years ago, they'd have realised when enough was enough, and known when to make a change for the good of the club. Instead, they ludicrously blamed perhaps the most placid, docile local media in the country for 'forcing out' a man not just frighteningly incompetent, but so divisive that he was loathed by most of his own players; and once again, have shown themselves wholly unable to take the tough, but entirely necessary decision. As a result, no matter what happens over the next week or two, they have squandered much of the trust and goodwill which they worked so hard to build up; and Worthington will depart not with bouquets, but with brickbats. The board are responsible for having such disgracefully low expectations and ambitions, and allowing the manager to drift along for months on end under no real pressure. Their indecisiveness has led to where we are now; and if success isn't forthcoming in May, it is they who will be to blame.

Posted By: thebigfeller on September 28th 2006 at 01:01:12

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