Let’s Pretend We’ve Scored A Goal

Norwich City are in a real state. A perpetual nightmare of losses, not scoring, poor play, injuries and illnesses. Rock bottom of the league and a laughing stock. Fans are starting to turn. The word toxic starts appearing more and more. Every day brings its own tension headache and its own internal crises in wanting to take a break from it all, but never quite being able to.

But, we’ve been here before. This is Norwich City – of course we’ve been here before.

We all know supporting a football club is so much more than just winning. So here are some tentative reasons as to why this all adds to the ultimately brilliant (ahem) tapestry of being a Norwich supporter – in sickness or in health.

Hang in there, kids.

“Whas goin’ on, buh?”

We sit, sweating under our big coats and hats and scarves, slumped against the foggy windows trying to get warmth back into our feet numb feet. The half-walk/half-jog to catch the train has been exhausting. The chastising experience of the match has been exhausting. Draining as much energy as a half marathon. All we want now is to get home as fast as possible.

As the train starts to crawl out of Norwich station, the stadium still lit up to our right, the scene of the very thing that has caused our abject disappointment and what we know will be a foul mood right through the week, a gentleman near the back asks the question to the stranger opposite them.

“What whas all ‘at about ‘en?”

There’s the thick Norfolk accent. There’s the natural Norfolkian lamentation in the voice – possibly even heightened from the now natural dropped accent, knowing that they are back home among their own. The warmth and friendliness, the automatic assumption of camaraderie, is what can only ever be found amongst football supporters.

And so, the conversation starts. Is there a better accent to complain in than the Norfolk one? Every sentence, the inflection is raised. Everything a question. Questioning this, questioning that. Everyone simultaneously knows the answer and doesn’t.

“They bough’ that striker, but they hint even getting shots on target!?” says someone, raising an arm dismissively.

“Pooki ain’ gettin’ a look in,” comes the reply. “He not even geddin a touch on the ball is he?”

It never fails to raise a smile, this talk. Talk that is as Norwich as mustard and castles. A tradition that has dated back 120 years. Oh for so how much we care, yet find so little reward. Another performance to bemoan at the paper shop, the chippy or when bumping into an old mate in Tesco.

When Norwich are in a mess, as they so often have been in all that time, someone, somewhere, from King’s Lynn to Yarmouth is asking, “Whas goin’ on then, buh?” It’s the chat that forms the glue of football fandom. Where tension and frustration is released. And from where decades-long friendships, even those where you never did learn that bloke’s name, are built. 

Flicking the Vs

As one of the greatest players ever to play football scored a debatable penalty at Carrow Road earlier in the season, a photographer snapped the moment Ronaldo was leaping into his patent-pending celebration – inadvertently capturing two things that held the attention of social media ‘content creators’ throughout the rest of that evening.

The first one, spotted by the neutrals in an effort to participate in weak piss-taking, was the huge number of supposed home fans (aka Man Utd fans who borrowed a mate’s ticket) snapping a picture of old Ronnie as he jumped. The other, received with delight by Norwich fans, was a young fan in a Norwich shirt with green and yellow beanie flicking the double V-sign to one of the world’s richest athletes. 

In a Premier League that has shown on multiple occasions that a club of Norwich’s relative prudence are most unwelcome, and in a country that still treats Norwich with disdain as a backwater, flicking the Vs at the establishment is still a delight – even if your team is collapsing into disaster. While genuine anti-establishment terrace culture has a somewhat patchy history in England, giving the V or wanker sign, truly the greatest of British cultural assets, at someone who is richer and in a position of power greater than yours will forever be as part of the match going experience as pie and Bovril.

The club you support becomes, by extension, a part of your personality. People applaud you and shout at you for the way your club is playing, despite the fact you haven’t actually played any part in how well they are doing. This can be a tough thing to take. If like me you grew up in an area which I shall not mention for fear of incriminating myself, it takes a long time to learn that it is better to simply shrug at them and say “Well it’s hardly me kicking the ball is it?”. At the end of the day, you’re still going to support your team, and piss-taking isn’t going to stop it.

With the media laughing at Norwich fans as much as they can, and with things showing no signs of improving, keep flicking the Vs as much as you can.

Fuck ‘em.

Typical City

Before Manchester City became, well, whatever they are now, their supporters had an epithet for their club, which will ring a certain tone with Norwich supporters: “Typical City”. 

Typical City was when Man City had a penchant for messing up something big like – promotion, survival from relegation or a title – from a seemingly easy position to the surprise of no one. Google the phrase and you will many examples of it, right up to AGUEROOOOOOOO where the curse, in rather spectacular fashion, was broken. 

To joke about your team’s habit of messing things up really is a source of amusement. Comfort in a dark place. A boiled-down version of the British working-class gallows humour. There must be many Man City supporters who secretly lament the decline of Typical City – one of the things that held them together as a true bond throughout all of those lean years. What a shame it must be to not think “playing XYZ Rovers next at Cursed Ground A? Yep that’s a loss incoming”. Right?

Norwich have, of course, a now-famous version of Typical City. Not just a phrase for the moments where we have messed up, but for their indisputable habit of breaking opposition winless streaks as well as a great catch all for those frequent occasions where we simply had the usual dose of bad luck. 

Recently, it has become a bit of a trend for fans of bigger clubs to put on a facade of self-defeatism, perhaps in an attempt to come across as more genuine – for calling out fakery in British football is a well-worn part of the fan culture that has become more prominent the more the financial gap has increased. Manchester United fans have, in particular, tried to take on the spirit of the “beleaguered” fanbase since they have somewhat dropped from grace in the last decade. But, as we all know, unless you’re (un)lucky enough to support a club like Norwich, you will never be able to genuinely feel the collective facepalming that is the along come Norwich. It’s always there. Like the blanket that brings you out in a rash, but you can’t help but hold onto for its sentimentality.

Maybe someone should name a fanzine after it?

Let’s pretend we’ve scored a goal

“Sign him up!” is the best generic chant in football. Why? Because when it is sung, something brilliant has just happened. This is, usually, in the form of an animal (usually a dog in the lower leagues, a cat in the higher leagues or, at Carrow Road, a goose) that has made its way onto the pitch and demonstrated a turn of agility over that of the home side’s own wingers/goalkeeper. Other examples include one of the players’ young children putting the ball in the net during a post-match promotion or title celebration, a member of the coaching staff doing a ball juggle in the technical area or (most boringly) a loan player having just put in a fantastic performance before he leaves the club.

And the final reason? Well… 

During the second half of Tuesday’s game against Palace, a Norwich fan runs onto the pitch in the middle of a Norwich attack to kick the ball at goal. This is a source of great amusement to the away end, not just because of the always funny sight of stewards chasing someone in a parka, but because of the great satire that it presents in that Norwich have only scored 8 league goals all year, barely mustered any shots on goal in their last four games and had several embarrassing missed chances throughout the season.

And so they chant: “sign him up, sign him up!”. A delicious takedown, considering Norwich’s pathetic goalscoring threat, but also a simultaneously serious message to the club that, yep, this is so shit a pitch invader has, almost literally, been our main attacking force.

Many a word has been said and written about the gallows humour of the football supporter. But in reality, it is hard to quantify until one witnesses it first-hand. While some chants like “we’re fucking shit” can display an undercurrent of toxicity towards the players and can become controversial, others are simply done for no other reason than self-amusement. “We’ve got the ballll” has become a staple of this genre, but  “let’s pretend we’ve scored a goal”, is surely the king – for the actual act of celebrating a goal, the best thing about being a football supporter, can still be simulated in such a manner to make it as fun as the real thing. Throw in a dose of laughter afterwards, and the whole thing cannot help but leave smiles on faces – even if you’re being smashed 3-0 away from home on a rainy day. 

Some might see it as taking the piss, yes. But really, what is the point of all this if you can’t laugh through the miserable moments?

Pints

Weak lager in a plastic (or paper) cup is the greatest and sweetest drink in the world because, if you are greedily gulping such a thing down, having just travelled a distance to get to it, then you are in one of the following brilliant places: a sporting event, a music gig, a beer festival or some sort of miscellaneous mass cultural event.

Jonathan Liew recently wrote an article about the joys of getting slowly pissed at the cricket, itself an institution, but one must also mention the joy of the quick pre-match and half-time football pint. With the view-of-the-pitch drinking ban still in force, the matchday pint has become, accidentally, timed to perfection in that you know that you can have the edge taken off for the first half and, just as that wears, you can have the quick second at half time. 

But that is not to mention the best quality of the matchday concourse pint, which is of course bumping into someone you know and having a chat. Exchanging thoughts on the team, the situation, that missed chance, how your week has been, the stress from work, how they are getting on, how their family is. If you rarely venture to your local pub due to the myriad of reasons such a thing can happen, that matchday pint is still there for that human touchpoint we all crave so readily. 

An even further delight still is, at an away ground. Where the first sip of the pre-match pint forever feels like the greatest distance you’ll ever get from your real-life stresses and worries. “This is where I am and what I am doing. Here, and now.” That Monday morning Zoom meeting is a parallel universe away.

At Carrow Road, the beer is still at a fairly reasonable price. Thank god for that, for when your team is playing shit, this makes the matchday pint a salvation ritual of stunning quality.

Going back generations

In their history Norwich City have hit the lowest of the low, bottom of the entire Football League, twice. They have also finished second bottom twice, meaning they have had to send a begging letter to Football League HQ and apply for re-election to the league on four occasions.

While it can be irritating to everyone, when going through a rough patch, to say “well back in the day…”, there is a certain degree of comfort to be found by the fact that supporters of Norwich on all four of these occasions were no doubt complaining of the same issues that we are lamenting now. While we do not know if the 5,394 who had turned up to witness Norwich lose 1-0 to Watford on the final day of the 1930/31 season – sealing Norwich’s last-place finish – booed the team off the pitch, it would be fair to suggest that there still would have been a fair amount of Norfolkian grumbling and questions as to what, indeed, was “going on in training (Mr Adams)”. 

And so it is that throughout generations stretching back to 1902, we canaries have been tutting and sighing and putting out heads in our hands as, yet again, another goal has been conceded through a defensive error. That very same place that you were standing in as Arsenal scored their 5th and you kicked the floor in anger, someone was no double doing the same on 19 April 1957 as Ipswich scored their winner against Norwich and practically sealed them to their fate of last place in the entire league. Some people get the pleasure of gold watches or coins. We get the oft-nightmare that is supporting Norwich City. And how many other 120-year-old heirlooms do you own that have been passed onto you that make you so annoyed, disappointed and upset yet you cannot bear to abandon?

As an aside, all four times Norwich finished in those last two places in the league, they were re-elected. The fourth time was somewhat hairy, as the club had fallen into severe financial disorder and the Football League had been known to lose their patience with clubs applying for re-election when in dire straits. Fortunately, they survived.

That was 1957. Two years later, they beat Sheffield United 3-2 on the muddy Carrow Road pitch to make it to the FA Cup semi-finals for the first-ever time.  

Which brings us, neatly, to the final small crumb of comfort we can hold onto in these dark times:

Carrying on regardless

Because, sometimes, it still happens…

From kick off we’re chasing and chasing. Everyone’s behind the ball immediately and we’re all focused. Focused, focused, focused. Touches and throw ins are roared with a delight as we know we’re not really entitled to them. Not now. Not with who we’re playing.

A big club is in the Fine City. A rich club with a mega stadium and a posh airline as their shirt sponsor, or perhaps a grand old mainstay, who have had a trophy or a cup a season as far back as the Rothman’s records began. But we’re equals today. We’re not going to roll over. We’re going to be fighting and fighting. Not just for ourselves, but for all clubs like ours. We’ve been pushed around TV schedules by them, stripped of our best players by them, mocked and patronised by them. But now it is our turn. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, and rouse him at the name of Norwich City.

The game takes on an ethereal and hellish quality at the same time. Tackles from our men fly in with bravery and fearlessness. Clearances are hoofed high and long with cheers as the ball’s silhouette crosses the lux of floodlights on its way onto Koblenz Avenue. The football fan’s classic stomach lurch of panic, when a winger runs clear and a cross is swiped into our penalty area, becomes frequent and sickening. The Barclay is at a frenzy. Mocking the away support with chants referring to their short trips home and singing the name of every player that touches the ball. There’s a barrage of shots, long balls, slices through the defence, set pieces and woodwork pingers. On TV possession stats are shown. 80%. Only a matter of time now for them….surely?

And yet we hold firm and we hold true. “Norwich are growing into the game” they say on the radio. We string a few passes together. The odd cross here, the blocked through ball there.

It may be a clearance that has found a yellow shirt suddenly breaking away, or a rare free-kick floated in from the wing or even, perhaps, just a sublime piece of skill – a crossfield ball delivered with military precision or a long-range shot cracked like a gunshot. The net ripples and there’s an intake of breath as everyone, through a force of habit, checks the assistant’s flag. Yes. It has stayed down.

We’ve scored. We’ve only gone and bloody scored.

It’s pandemonium. A din, clamour, madhouse, uproar and a brouhaha. Throw the thesaurus in the bin because none of those will describe it. It’s a feeling higher than mere words and sentences. Once the chaos dies down, we will know that there’s still a long way to go, but in these glorious next five minutes, we few, we band of brothers and sisters, stand as one, telling all who wants, and doesn’t want to hear that: we’re Norwich City, we win or die, we never mind the danger and, hurrah! We’ve scored a goal! CITY! CITY! CITY!

As the game goes on, time stands stiller and stiller. The stadium clock appears to be running backwards. Substitutes are made and Plan Bs and Cs are worked through. Desperation is thrown at us. But, usually in these situations, quite brilliantly, there’s a misplaced pass from a footballer paid £200,000 a week to do that most simple of basic things. It runs out of play and is howled at with a kind of laughter normally only reserved for the top billing at the Hammersmith Apollo, dispelling the tension to remind us all for that brief moment that it is only a game after all.

The 80s take as long as the decade. The 89th minute ticks, and a man in a black tracksuit holds up a board that allows them a few more minutes to try and score.

But we hold firm. Firm, firm, firm. A shot is snatched at and drifts hopelessly wide. Goal kick Norwich. The ref puts his whistle to his lips and, as our keeper smashes the ball as high as he can possibly reach, the man in black raises his arm and peeps.

It’s happened. 

Time’s up and the place is going bananas. There’s a scream of delight and relief from the Barclay, and E block is already goading away fans who are sitting aghast with mouths like goldfish. Multi-million-pound international footballers in red or blue fall to the ground crestfallen. Newly born legends in yellow circle the pitch, grinning and applauding, hugging each other – not knowing quite what they have done. Our manager waves triumphantly around the ground like a general after a heroic battle, last week’s defeat entirely forgotten. Our throats are hoarse, our fingernails bitten to the bone and we’re delirious with a joy that can’t be described.

Written off by Paul Merson and Mark Lawrenson. The 14/1 shots. The no-hopers and the journeymen. Men that we see in kebab shops on Prince of Wales Road, or in Morrison’s Car Park, and we know travel the A47 like us, have beaten a team of legendary World Champions or Champions League winners. The players who will be advertising next season’s Fifa or will be racing a tiger in a new Nike advert. Has that just fucking happened?

On TV and online, the blame game has already started for the losing team. The BBC live text wonders how it will damage their title chances. Gary Neville sweeps his arm across a giant touch screen, moving around little circles around on a pitch, scratching his head and wondering how on earth that could have occurred. On Twitter, fingers are pointed: What was he thinking playing him on the wing? A better goalkeeper would have saved that. Why didn’t he bring him off the bench earlier? The online newspapers have already written their reports. None of them barely give Norwich a mention, instead focusing on how long their fans ‘will stand for this mediocrity’. And yet we don’t care. Watching and rewatching a bad recording of the goal someone has put on Twitter off of an illegal stream on the train ride home, we laugh at the unbelievability of it all. In this day and age of modern football, where money is king and something like this is supposed to be impossible, we actually went and did it. 

You can’t wait for work on Monday, when you can wave your Norwich mug in front of that glory-hunting supporter in your office or factory. You can actually look forward to watching Match of the Day. Someone near you announces that Ipswich have lost 2-0 at Crewe or Rotherham and they slip to 13th.

What a time that is to be alive.