The future of NCFC

The Loan Players

It really annoys me when I keep reading and hearing in the media that the only option we have as a club is to pad our squad with 9 loan players. This is absolute rubbish. Name one other club in the football leagues who have that amount of loan players and there are many clubs in a financial mess like us and they don?t have 25,000 fans coming to watch them.
Roeder claims that getting the loan players in is the only way to get quality into our squad but I am still waiting to see this so called quality from the majority of the loan players.
The loan signing that defies belief is Troy Archibald Henville from Spurs. Yesterday he was the only fit centre back in the club and yet he was deemed too raw to even merit a place on the bench. Why oh why are we paying for his wages/accommodation at Dunston Hall etc for the season if he is too raw to get anywhere near the side when we have a defensive crisis. It is not as though we have a reserve team anymore who are playing every week. The odd friendly against Kirkley is hardly going to make him less raw!
Many clubs use the loan system by complementing their squad with 2 or 3 players as Nigel Worthington did with such affect in our promotion season with the additions of Huckerby, Crouch and Harper/Cooper however having 9 loan players in a squad is simply not healthy.

Roeder and Team Selection
I am afraid that Roeder and Clark talk the talk but they are failing to walk the walk. Recently I read a report in which Clark stated whilst he is at the club no Norwich team would ever go out and play with less than 100% commitment and that they would not simply role over and die. Did he miss the 4 -0 maulings at Leicester and Coventry last season? I also saw very little fight and commitment yesterday from certain players.
We continually seem to play players out of position, excluding the 2 full backs that have filled in at centre back yesterday, during the season we have seen Russell up front, Bertrand on the left wing, Hoolihan on the right wing, Patterson on the right wing, Koroma on the left wing etc. Roeder specifically stated when he took over that he would not put round pegs in square holes but he continually does week in week out.

We have 4 loan strikers and have so far tried 6 players upfront ( Russell, Siberski, Lupoli, Koroma, Cureton, Lita). We knew at the end of the 2006/2007 that Dion Dublin would be retiring at the end of the 2007/2008 season. Surely this was ample time to get a target man replacement in but alas no. It appears that Roeder put all his eggs in one basket chasing Iverson as his replacement and when he failed to pull this deal off after it dragging on for months he was left on the last day of the transfer window scrabbling around for any sort of target man to play up front. Helguson from Bolton turned us down so at the 11th hour Roeder had to get Siberski in who is simply not a target man. He has played the majority of his career as an attacking midfielder and his goal scoring record clearly shows this.
We currently have 4 ?small strikers? namely Lita, Lupoli, Cureton and Koroma. Small strikers need one of two things either a big target man to play off or a creative midfield who can pick early passes down the channels for the strikers to run on to. Unfortunately we have neither a target man nor a midfield that can pass it forward let alone pick creative early passes down the sides of the opposition centre backs. Yesterday on many occasions Lita wanted the ball early into the channels and we instead held onto the ball in midfield and took extra touches and shuffled the ball sideways. You can try as many strikers as you like but until you sort out either a target man or a creative midfielder the small strikers will fail to score regularly.

The Boardroom
Yesterday I heard an interview on Radio 5 live with the West Brom Chairman who stated that football has changed vastly over the last 5 years and that all clubs now need a very rich benefactor preferably a billionaire to bankroll the club. He stated that there are only a certain amount of these types about and that he touted West Brom around in the summer and they failed to get a single interested party despite them about to embark on a premiership season. Obviously I do not know what the exact situation is on the Carrow Road Boardroom but from were I stand it appears that our board and club have failed to move with the changing times of football. During the summer we were in the rare position of having a billionaire with an affiliation to the club show an interest and yet our board failed to even meet him face to face to discuss the potential of taking the club forward. The debate about Delia and whether she has been good or bad for the club can go on and on but it will not help the club. The board have to realise that they have taken us as far as they can and if we are ever to get back to the top half of the championship let alone the premiership we can?t afford to turn down people like Peter Cullum.

I believe there is a very cosy approach to everything at the club at the moment. This is reflected in Neil Doncaster?s role at the club. I do not believe it is in the best interest of the club to have the Chief Executive also as a Director of the club. Surely this is a conflict of interest?

The Media
I have become very frustrated with the way things are reported about Norwich City in the media. The EDP seems to an extension of the Carrow Road PR department. This is not in the best interests of the club either. Perhaps if the local media showed some balls and criticised the club when criticism is due it would help the club rather than paper over the cracks that are getting wider and wider.

Conclusion
NCFC is in terminal decline and urgent changes are needed. I am afraid we have not hit the bottom yet and I believe division one football is looming unless we readdress the situation very quickly. The approach at the moment appears very much to be turn a blind eye and paper over the cracks and somehow we will come out smelling of roses. Unfortunately this is no the case and the cracks will only get wider unless something is done.

Posted By: happy clappy hughes, Oct 5, 10:38:01