The Along Come Norwich Review – Leeds United (a)

Biggest Positive

After the Brentford game, we kind of knew we were down. After today, we know for sure. Often as a Norwich fan it is the hope that gets you. Well, we won’t have that problem for the rest of the season. It is done.  

Biggest Problem

Where to even start? We were slower in the build-up than Leeds (Leeds!), we were less creative than Leeds (Leeds!!), and were less up for the fight than Leeds (Leeds!!!)

It’s hard to state this strongly enough for those who didn’t watch the game: the score flatters Norwich horribly. If it had been 4-0 at half-time we would have had no cause for complaint. 

Our problems are in every area of the pitch and it’s now too late to fix them. 

Funniest Moment Of The Game

As the Leeds winner went in, as genuine scenes of pandemonium started to break out in the home stands, I turned to my mate Darren and said, “well you have to laugh, don’t you?” I honestly wanted to cry – to go from elation to utter devastation in mere minutes is savage – but you just had to laugh at the absolute Norwichness of the moment. 

Did An Along Come Norwich Happen?

Dean Smith made a thing about how both teams had lost six games on the bounce coming into this game but noted that we’d been up against much bigger teams, like Liverpool and Chelsea. This immediately damned us to the inevitable ACN and all that was in question was whether we’d be tonked 4-0 or suffer a cruel last-minute winner. 

Norwich’s best player

Jonathan Rowe was Norwich’s best player across the 90 minutes, and he didn’t play for most of them. I know we mustn’t load all our hopes and sadness on his shoulders but he’s exciting, skilled and full of fight at a time when those attributes are lacking in the rest of the team. His snapshot that hit the bar was our first genuinely exciting moment of the game.  

What was the atmosphere like?

I don’t love to praise Leeds. They’re not a great club and there’s a lot to dislike. But the home support put on, by far, the best atmosphere I’ve seen in years, perhaps ever. It made the likes of Liverpool and Man City look like church choirs. They were loud and they were consistently so throughout. The celebration for their second was both one of the most horrendous gut-punches I’ve ever experienced in a football ground, and a work of limbs-based art that, despite the circumstances, I just had to stand and admire. 

The Norwich fans were in good voice in patches and passionate despite the efforts on the field. But ultimately, fans react to what they’re seeing. The players were tepid throughout. There’s only so much we can do on our own. 

Summary 

We can talk about the game – our torrid first half, our chances in the second, the mayhem of the last ten. We can talk about the shocking refereeing, which wasn’t particularly tilted one way or the other, just very bad. We can talk about how the game might have been different if the extremely red card offence in the first half had been caught. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter now. 

There’s something quite overwhelming about watching your team get relegated. I was there when Villa put us down in the 1990s, and at the 6-0 Craven Cottage defeat in 2005. It’s a competition between feelings of anger, sadness and helplessness, and the battle between those feelings ebbs and flows over the course of a long time, during which the opposition fans are a constant interruption to your grief. 

For almost 85 minutes I was mainly angry at the players for the tepid play, at too many of them for failing to make the grade. The ending complicated things, with the utter disbelieving joy at the idea of an escape hatch somehow miraculously being opened, followed by the pain of the door being slammed shut in our face. 

The reality is that the team isn’t good enough for the Premier League. That’s hard to say. I’m as happy a clapper as they come, but it’s just true. In every area of the field, the opposition has the edge, at best. Leeds are not a good team, at all. But we made them look much better than they really are. The game could’ve been done and dusted by 30 minutes. 

It is hard to be angry at the players. Yes, we want to see more fight. But they’re not idiots. They can see the writing on the wall. The blame lies elsewhere: partially with Stuart Webber and, mainly, with a game that has set itself up to ensure that clubs like ours fail. 

When the postmortem on the season is written, the internal blame shouldn’t be laid at the feet of Daniel Farke or Dean Smith. The team is not, and has not been, especially mismanaged. We are just not good enough. Recruitment has not been good enough. The blame for that is not with the players or the managers, who have to front up to the media and the fans every week, but with the sporting director who, incidentally, has used one of his only media appearances this season to have a pop at the fans. 

And yet, it is also somewhat futile to blame the sporting director. The problems we saw today and all season are a reflection of the game itself. As the only self-funded club in the league, we are destined to struggle. Some people wish for a solution to that problem that involves Delia and Michael selling to someone with hundreds of millions to fritter away, and hope that that person isn’t a dictator’s friend or a dictator themselves. I would love that too. I don’t think it will happen but I would love to be wrong. But what I wish more than anything is that the utter shame that Roman Abramovich has rained down on Chelsea Football Club is a moment of reckoning for the whole game and that we reach a point where living within your means is not something to mock and belittle, but something to praise. 

In the meantime, we have a grim trudge through the remaining games and a delicate summer of rebuilding a fractured team, and club.