The ACN Match Review – Crystal Palace (h)

Biggest Positive

Ah, the shithoused point. There was such a time when such a thing seemed impossible for Norwich to obtain in the Premier League. No longer. This is shithouse, shithouse Norwich City. A trait in the Premier League that we have lacked for some considerable time, but which is now imperative to staying in the league. While the debate about whether shithousery as a legitimate tactic is killing the game will ramble on, I don’t half enjoy my own team getting away with it and getting points out of it as a result.

Biggest Negative

Continuously coughing up possession was a big worry in the second half especially when the team we play next will put us through a New York Deli’s meat slicer if we keep making those mistakes. Frankly, I don’t think we played well at all in the second half, and it has somewhat diluted the optimism that had been flowing through my veins since the Watford game. Hmm…

Atmosphere

Poor. No other way of describing this, unfortunately. One of those occasional home games where you expect the atmosphere to be crackling but it never really seems to get going. Whole swathes of the second half were met with silence, despite some booming tackles and blocks from Maximillian ‘Fucking Dynamite” Aarons and the saves from Gunn.

Genuinely can’t put my finger on this why this was the case. Other than the fact it was midweek. Let’s hope for something far better on Saturday.

Did an Along Come Norwich happen?

No. In fact, the opposite was the case in that we got away with one really. We’ve had a fair share of luck in recent games, and it would appear that it isn’t quite as hard work now to get that luck. Long may it continue.

Norwich’s Best Player

A really annoying part of modern football is that when goalkeepers make stunning saves, it’s now sort of dismissed as an irrelevance and something that should have been expected. But, make no mistake, Angus Gunn’s two saves were of the highest quality, saved us the point and were a good one in the eye of those who had criticised him after one performance. 

Apart from the penalty, Max (who’s winning the Barry Butler btw) also put a blinding performance, but it was Gunn who gave us the point.

Funniest Moment

I don’t need to tell you this one. It’s easy to get serious and say “it was a massive let off at the end of the day”, but if you can’t laugh at that then you’re taking football far too seriously. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw some of Zaha’s own players sniggering at it.

Summary

I have had a habit of picking games this season that will be completely forgotten about within a couple of months. While the penalty miss will go down in Carrow Road folklore, I can’t see Rewind Norwich doing a retrospective of the game in 10 years’ time. So let’s move on, and so ends a relatively okay set of fixtures, in which we gave ourselves a shot. A chance. An attempt at the miracle is on.

It’s irritating that I am now very unbothered about Saturday, such is the boring robotic nature of Manchester City’s billion pound ultra-perfection winning machine. Their approach to football is like a £1000 Bluetooth speaker hooked up to Spotify: clean, crisp, and all based on a bunch of 1s and 0s going into some unseen algorithm – as far removed from the human touch as possible. 

It might get the job done in the most perfect way possible, but I’d rather pop a vinyl on my record player and hear that imperfect, warming, crackle.