Along Come Norwich Flashback – Tottenham 1 – 1p Norwich City (2020 – A)

Story of the match

The last time Norwich had a cup run, about 21 million of today’s UK residents weren’t alive. If you wanted to call a friend when you were out, you needed 10p for the phonebox. Rhythm is a Dancer was a long running chart topper. 

It was a seriously long time ago. So when we stuck one on Preston in the third round, it felt like a nice break from the slog of the Premier League and nothing more. Ahead of the fourth round against Burnley, it felt like a wasted journey. But then we won, and things started to get a little serious. 

As the final whistle went at the end of extra time in the quarter final replay against Southampton in 1992, Jon Motson exclaimed, “Norwich are in the semi-finals of the FA Cup for the second time in four seasons under David Stringer!” When I was a kid, we were cup specialists. And now we had a chance of reaching the last eight again for the first time in a generation.

The occasion met with expectations. Spurs’ new stadium is genuinely impressive and nine thousand Norwich fans made the journey to Tottenham. The game itself was almost over before it was ten minutes old. Spurs scored a free header at the far corner, right in front of where were standing, and Krul made two absolute worldy saves before things calmed down. It could have been done and dusted very, very early.

If you watch the highlights back, it looks like we dominated the rest of the game. The truth is that it was an evenly matched, and fairly nervy, cup match. But when we equalised it was well-earned. The goal itself is comical. A shot from distance spilled by the keeper, followed up by Josep Drmic. To describe it as ‘bundled into the goal’ would be to flatter Drmic dramatically. The goal was so scrappy, I thought it had been disallowed. When we realised it would stand, there was pandemonium amongst the 9,000 Norwich fans. 

Extra time was an anti-climax as we clung on. The fact that the arrival of penalties was – to anyone in yellow and green – a blessed relief, says it all.

I’ve seen three penalty shoot-outs in the flesh. Beating Rochdale away in an early League Cup round was one of them and losing to Birmingham in a play-off final was the other (one was definitely more fun than the other, but only just). This was the third. Watching Norwich take penalties is like watching them play Ipswich. I’m more worried about things going wrong, than excited about it going right. But it all raced by. Oh no, McClean, it’s over. Idah. Oof, that was cool. Stierperman. Bang. Cantwell’s was ballsy, as were the keepy uppies beforehand. Then Fernandes. In the time it took for the ball to trickle towards Krul, I had time to think back to that Southampton quarter final all those years ago. Then, scenes.

We didn’t have much to cheer about that season. But this game made up for a lot of the grind that went on around it.

You may have forgotten that

This game features in the Amazon fly-on-the-wall documentary about Spurs. Being able to watch the Tottenham players trudge back into their changing room, sullen, moody, angry…. It really adds to the experience if you watch it back to back with the game highlights. 

What happened next?

COVID happened next. The night was already weird with the growing alarm about the approaching pandemic. Conservations were already being had about canceling games, or people just deciding to not go. A few days after the Spurs game, I was at Bramall Lane feeling positively anxious about the decision to attend, and soon enough football was put on ice. 

There were 10,339 days between our 1992 quarter final and our return to that stage of the cup in 2019. We’ll never know if our cup run could have gone further with fans in the stands, but when it comes to the football-specific grim side of COVID, not being able to go to the quarter final is surely up there.

Long term significance

It’s easy to forget that there were stretches of the 2019/20 season where Norwich were good. Really good. Good enough to have a fighting chance, and good enough to go toe-to-toe with the best teams in the league. We did it three times with Spurs, winning one, being robbed of another win by VAR, and losing one, perhaps unfairly. In many ways, this FA Cup game was the one we least deserved to win of the three.

But this game came at the end of the first part of the season, at the end of the Before Times. Long-term, the significance of this game was washed away by lockdown, City went on to lose their first FA Cup quarter final in 30 years in a whimper against Man Utd, and who knows who then went onto win the final. Who cares, frankly.