Re: What pants said below about Hughton and Farke

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I hear you pants - because there have been a whole bunch of occasions in my Norwich-following life when I (and others) *just couldn't get closure*.

- Not bringing in a replacement for Gunn/not sacking Deehan much earlier/then that grim, grim Sunday morning when O'Neill quit. From which we never moved forwards again for the next five-and-a-half years.

- 6-0 at Fulham followed by over a year of messing around with Worthington. Leading to a plunge into League 1

- Sacking Hughton when we did and replacing him with who we did - since when we've never looked remotely capable of surviving in the Prem

- Sacking Farke when we did and replacing him with who we did: cue another tailspin, from which we only bottomed out in the second half of last season

Crucial decisions, bungled. Leading to years and years of being reamed with the dildo of consequences. But having said that...

1. It remains pretty unlikely Hughton would've kept us up. Even if he had, we were only going one way under him overall. He never 'fit' the club at all; he just wasn't us.

2. Under Chase, at a time English football was changing at unprecedented speed, it's inconceivable we'd have stayed at the top even if he'd made much better decisions. I guess there's just a chance that MON could've done for us what he did for Leicester - but many of our players outright loathed him, and plenty of fans weren't convinced even during his short spell. Mostly because of his style of play.

3. Recruitment for a club of our size, our means and crucially, our location will always be hellishly difficult - and has been made worse by Brexit too. So many players and managers just don't want to come to Norwich, and certainly not stick around if a bigger club comes sniffing. We're not in London, we're not in its environs, we're not on the south coast. We're just too far out of the way to ever be that big or high profile - and who we recruit is impacted by that, hugely.

Could we have signed much higher quality players and therefore given Farke a proper shot at keeping us up? Probably not, no. Who we did bring in cost us a wage bill of 120 million, for God's sake; a quite grotesque figure for a squad of utter s**te.

And would he always have moved on sooner or later to a much bigger club with real potential at the top level? Yes he would. He was too good for us; we didn't deserve him in many ways.

Where we are now is basically where a club of our means should be: on the fringes of things, capable of looking s**t hot on occasion and of stinking the place out on others. And often of being very soft: that's the flipside of being a club which so often tries to play in a certain way (a way which Hughton would never have even tried to embrace, but Farke did, with bells on).

Maybe we'll go back up before too long, maybe we won't. But it's not like we'd do anything in the Prem anyway. Location, location, location. So in the end, we are what we are. A natural Championship club which will have moments of glory and others of misery.

It'll be like this... forever.

Posted By: thebigfeller on September 14th 2026 at 22:02:18

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