Kenny Mclean; Next Please

Saturday’s win over Bristol City seemed seminal for a number of reasons. We won despite being behind twice, we beat the division’s form team, and despite only getting into top gear intermittently, when we did, we looked good enough to just swat away anyone that dared come near us.

It also pushed a new face to the centre stage, the latest in the apparently limitless cast that this season’s team has used to reinvent itself on demand.

Kenny McLean must have been tempted at times to write this season off, seeing as it took him until mid-February to complete a league game. But his assured performance away at Bolton (penalty curse aside) and his two crucial goals against Bristol City suggest he might have enough in his locker to be the man to carry the baton through the final leg.

Interestingly, previous Norwich teams who have managed to get over the promotion line have almost always featured a crucial player emerging from the shadows for the final push.

The most recent exponent, in Alex Neil’s play-off winners of 2015, was Nathan Redmond.

Despite his obvious ability, Redmond’s bewildering inconsistency meant he was an intermittent presence for much of the season, only nailing down a regular starting spot as the season drew to its close. His form picked up accordingly, scoring as many goals in May as he did in the entire rest of the season. His contribution of course included the vital goal in the home leg against Ipswich and the greatest goal ever seen at Wembley, but he relentlessly ran defences ragged throughout the final months of the season as he finally pulled together all of the component parts of his game.

The gold standard for end-of-season contributions though, still probably belongs to Simeon Jackson, a player irrevocably linked with the final weeks, games and moments of the 2010-11 season.

When Simeon replaced Dani Pacheco with 20 minutes to play against Scunthorpe at the beginning of April, he had four league goals under his belt, the most recent being more than five months ago. He proceeded to score three in the next 20 minutes, and a further six in the remaining eight games, several of which need little introduction.

Ok, let’s recount them anyway. There was the madness of Derby at home (another hat-trick by the way) and the final icing on the cake at Portsmouth. But he also smashed the anti-penultimate nail into 1p5wich’s humiliation and saved us from what might have been a deflating midweek defeat at Watford, a goal which crucially stemmed the bleed of a now long-forgotten thrashing that we’d taken at Swansea a few days previously. To put those nine goals of Jackson’s into a career context, Jackson’s best haul in an entire season since is seven, for Walsall in League One two years ago.

Of Nigel Worthington’s 2004 Champions, Leon McKenzie probably had a rather longer run-up to his grandstand finish, but he probably just paced himself better.

He marked his debut in December with those two famous goals at Portman Road that gave us the top spot we never relinquished. He might have lost his way a little later, getting a grand total of two minutes playing time in the whole of February, but the boxer in him was probably just easing up for a few rounds, and readying some big blows. He subsequently started all seven of our consecutive wins that ended with the title already in the bag at Sunderland, scoring in five of those games.

The exception, amongst the recent pantheon of promotion winners at least, is the League One winners of 2009-10. After we were beaten at Leeds in October, Lambert polished the rough edges of his midfield diamond into such a gem that we won 21 of the 25 games between then and us being hosed down at the return fixture at the end of March. Such was the consistency of that run, it pretty much negated the need for Lambert to look for anyone “Jackson-like” during January. Two of our signings during that window, Russell Martin and Anthony MacNamee, were already with us on-loan so it was pretty steady stuff all-round. Back in the days when he was on the right side of both the border and insanity, Lambert sensibly eased us up with 10 points to spare.

One suspects that there will be no such luxuries this season. Sheffield United look like a dogged unit that sadly won’t go away. Despite four defeats in nine, Leeds United are still chewing our trouser leg. West Brom have scored just one goal fewer than us, and Middlesbrough are still there shithousing their way to binary wins.

But one of Farke’s most remarkable achievements, has been that since Nelson Oliveira went overboard, he has seemingly kept the rest of the squad in the boat for the whole season.

Zimmermann, Godfrey, Aarons, Vrancic, Stiepermann and, most recently, Tom Trybull have all been out of the picture at various times, but each has been able to reset and emphatically take a chance when one has come their way. If McLean can do the same, now his injuries are seemingly behind him, his could be the most crucial contribution yet.