PLEASE READ THIS!!

So, another Canary manager departs the club. A club who are seriously under-achieving once again and scratching around the lower reaches of English football’s 2nd tier. A club where there is increasing animosity between supporters and board and a squad lacking the quality that is needed.

This really does feel like deja-vu to me. Indeed, it feels like I’ve stepped back into the mid-1990’s….. but instead of all that studying I need to be getting on with during my student days and choosing whether to listen to either Oasis or Blur through my discman, I quickly realise that this really is the year 2007. What happened in the 1990's is happening all again folks.

The club may be built on a more solid platform than back in 1996. This despite the £17m debt, which we are assured is a structured debt, and therefore not as much a noose round our neck as it was back in 1996. We have also since built the Jarrold Stand and vastly increased other commercial activities to help generate income for the club.

On the field, there are too many similarities to 1996, where we are simply not good enough. But where has it really gone wrong for Norwich this time around? The true fact is that getting rid of Peter Grant is not the end of our problems. I really believe that this just papers over other cracks at the club - problems that are more long-standing than Grant’s managerial appointment alone.

Nigel Worthington did a brilliant job for Norwich between his appointment in 2001 and gaining promotion in 2003. Although the Premiership season ended in failure, it was a narrow-run thing and ultimately the facts show that we were close to staying up. However, looking back, I personally believe that our problems began smouldering before the Premiership season had even begun…

For a Championship team of Norwich’s ilk, upon gaining promotion to the Premiership, I think all realistic fans would say that if we were to stay up, fanstastic. However, the one thing that must be ensure is that if we were to go down, we must return to the Championship in a far more stronger position. This was not done. Why? In my opinion, Worthington’s purchases going into the Premiership season were disastrous.

Mattias Jonson and Thomas Helveg – completely unproven in English football, expensive gambles (were they even scouted?) and for me, were never, ever, going to hang around if we got relegated. At the age of 30 and 34 respectively, they were always going to be expensive short-term purchases.

Doherty and Charlton were no better than we had. In fact, probably less so. Expensive, ineffective purchases – Charlton, at 34, also being a short-term purchase.

Going into a Premiership season, we strengthened our midfield with just Youseff Safri – no Premiership experience having been bought from Coventry. An ok purchase, but surely an assault on the Premiership should have warranted greater Premiership experience, as proved when plain to everyone that both Holt and Mulryne were not good enough for the Premiership.

Then we get onto the goalkeepers. Injury permitting, Robert Green was always going to be number 1. Why on earth did we see the requirement to buy 2 further experienced goalkeepers in Paul Gallacher (free transfer plus wages) and then Darren Ward (£400k plus wages)? If we ever required a 3rd goalkeeper for whatever reason, the emergency keeper loan market would have sufficed – as demonstrated by Southampton in our 2-1 victory at Carrow Road (Kasey Keller being the emergency keeper loan in question). Darren Ward was wasted money that would have been better spent on another outfield player.

Dean Ashton was the one successful purchase of our Premiership season, though did not arrive until January!

As we know, the Premiership season ultimately ended in failure. Amongst others, Holt, Mackay, Roberts, Francis, Edworthy all departed for various reasons, with Jonsson and Helveg also leaving English football at the first available opportunity. What a surprise.

The bulk of our Premiership purchases in 2004 should have been players that we could have looked to build our squad around for years to come (even if they were good Championship players as opposed to mediocre Premiership players) – instead we ended up with the complete opposite, as the majority jumped ship upon relegation. They were big gambles which simply did not work.

No forward planning was made to our purchases in 2004 – which came back to haunt Worthington a year later in 2005, as he had given himself an impossible task to rebuild a squad that had been ripped to shreds following relegation. It was too big a mountain for Worthington to climb; a challenge in which he never recovered from. In fact, I think that the summer 2005 marked a big crossroads for Norwich, and I think it will take us years to recover from the mistakes that were made both in that summer and equally in 2004.

I shall not go into all the disastrous buys that were made in 2005, as I’m sure we know them all buy now (all having since left the club), but suffice to say that the knock-on effect of those two disastrous summers were still being felt by Peter Grant upon his arrival, who inherited an absolute dog’s dinner of a squad. He did his best to change it (which he simply had to try) but was unable to turn fortunes around on a shoestring budget (by today’s standards), as well as losing the only two “above average” players in the squad in Etuhu and Earnshaw for a pittance.

The mistakes of 2004 and 2005 will continue to be felt by the next manager of the club, whoever that may be, as we are no further forward than we were 12 months ago. Norwich is a club in a downward spiral at present, and it’s not getting any better. Despite our efforts to rescue ourselves, we are sinking deeper into the quicksand and we can all predict what is more than likely to happen next.

So what is the answer? The simple answer is that we need money. A hell of a lot of it. The good players cost money and we all know you get what you pay for in life.

How do we get the money? Good question – I don’t know. Together, somehow, we need to find out fast, as that is the only way I see us getting out of this mess we have found ourselves in over the past three years.

Delia and Michael have been brilliant for this club, but they now appear to be like pilots in a plane nose-diving fast to earth - there is nothing they can do to change the situation we find ourselves in. Putting the club up for sale might be the only way out we have.

Posted By: Wayne Biggins, Oct 10, 00:52:14