Good post off the Pink Un ....

Football supporters are typically an aspirational bunch of straw clutchers who want the best for their Club.

This message board is full of who we must keep and who we should buy in addition to how we can still make a go of it this season...but what is the reality?

Financially, we seem to have a small but highly paid squad and are in the last season of parachute payments after which our revenue falls off a cliff. Common sense dictates our wage bill will have to be cut unless we can somehow become a consistent team and gain promotion. Based on recent history can anyone honestly see Norwich City buying the quality in January of else improving what they have sufficient to gain promotion? The most likely result this season is mid-table mediocrity.

Huckerby is a luxury being used as a necessity, he is like cavalry being used before infantry and leaves a midfield so weak defensively a manager has to play five across the middle. Managers love him and hate him, that's why he has had so many Clubs. That said he is a magnificent character and a Norwich legend. If you play Hucks up front he drifts wide of his strike partner but at least he can have some rein there; as a midfielder, for me, never! Grant will be trying to build a team unit and Hucks doesn't do team units. He is a player to be brought on once the dirty work has been done or to change a game. I fear Grant will let him go.

Earnshaw, he will get goals and a struggling premiership side will buy him for those goals in January because relegation is such a disaster established Clubs will fork out any sum to avoid it. Expect Earnie to go.

Safri is another luxury player who belongs in a big squad but can't do the week in, week out thing. He seems to be unsettled and will surely go at the end of the season.

Etuhu is a player attracting Premiership Clubs, for his physicality as much as anything else, he will go at the end of the season.

The worst aspect of all this is that Norwich tied themselves into contracts with under-performers which still have a couple of seasons to run.

It is a shame, a tale of time and opportunity wasted by the Board but, Norwich are due a mediocre and fitfull season where they will sell or release their most valuable assets and Grant, who is trying to get blood out a stone will only fairly be judged by what he does transfer wise next summer and in the season to follow.

I blame the Board for their failure to keep momentum by replacing Nigel Worthington a long time ago when it was obvious he had run his course (a natural cycle in many jobs) but above all else I resent the fact that Norwich has become a Club which routinely gets beaten embarrasingly and has a team which regularly fails to turn up in matches. A thrashing seems to mean nothing these days; players verbally scourge themselves in the media but then fail repeatedly again which is simply disingenuous. Norwich City has lost it's honesty and it's sense of perspective. It has become de-sensitised to abusive results like some soccer based victim of domestic violence.

At the moment Grant still has fight in him....woe betide us should he lose that; we'll be back on the manager merry-go-round again. It is the Board which must change, they cannot see it themselves so it is time they brought in new people who can show them how.

Posted By: meeky on November 22nd 2006 at 13:14:51

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