Man City have always been a bit of a bogie team for Norwich, looking at the history we have won 10, drawn 23 and lost 38 times against them. The Citizens have had some pretty impressive wins in the past and with Norwich back in the relegation zone and the opposition sitting pretty on top of the league it looks a very tall order. Man City are in good form having won 4 out of their last 5 Premier League, most recently 2-0 Vs Brentford. The Canaries have two wins, two defeats and a draw in their last five games. Having scored early against Crystal Palace, Norwich had very limited possession and were fortunate of a scuff penalty which allowed them to draw. With players such as Sargent, Gilmore and Normann available to Dean Smith it will be interesting what side is put out against the multi billionaires. But last time Man City came to Norwich, and Norwich had a severely depleted backline with injury this happened.... The champions will be up for it. Lightning couldn't strike twice, could it? No More content to follow.....
Norwich v Man City (17:30) Norwich are unbeaten in three league games now and they have given themselves a chance of staying up, which did not look very likely at the turn of the year. But this is Manchester City they are up against here. Pep Guardiola's side are just relentless at the moment - nothing really changes and you just know they will find a way of winning this game even if they don't play particularly well. Lawro's prediction: 0-3
Can't really disagree with Lawro there, but it would be nice to keep them to a one or two goal win to show real progress since the beginning of the season thrashing. I also don't fancy a game of us defending entirely, so a little bit of a forward threat would be nice too.
This is your big test, Zog. This is like a player who's had a couple of useful run-outs in the under-23s suddenly facing a first-team game.
Just rewatched the highlights of the game from two years ago. What went wrong that season after the Covid break? Why were we so abject when we looked so promising for the first few games of the season?
Completely agree. It’s why I worry about the style of football Smith seems to be leaning towards - it might get results, but if it’s not pretty eventually our fans won’t be happy.
Part of it was Pukki's injury. He had 11 goals by mid-January, if memory serves, then he hurt his toe and didn't look the same player after that. He ended the season with 11 goals.
This is something I worry about as well long-term. This season we will cheer Smith to the rafters if he somehow manages to keep us up, even if it means 25% possession and a one-dimensional, diagonal-long-balls-to-the-wings strategy in games. But, if we do survive, we can't just have more of the same next season - at some point we have to evolve into a team more like (I hate to say it!) Palace or Brighton. And if we go down, can we suddenly switch our style, or do we play like that in the Championship, and will that provide the results that Farke's style did? Problems for a possible future, I know, and now is not the time to address them. But the future will be here in May whatever happens, so those problems are not far away.
I think we need to look at what Smith did at Villa, getting them into the playoffs and promotion and then building a team capable of surviving in the PL. S&S have to work with the players we have to achieve results over the remaining games. I liked Farkeball but we don't have the players to make it work in the PL. We struggled against Palace's tall players but still made it work well enough to get the draw and had we been more clinical we might have won. Compare our goal difference under Smith to that under Farke and you see the value of pragmatism. I'm interested to see how we do today compared to the 5-0 thrashing we took early on. It'll be a different sort of test.
I do agree and I’m not clamouring to get rid of Smith at all, I was really positive about his appointment, and remain so. But his budget at Aston Villa was astronomically bigger, even without the sale of Grealish. Their wage bill must be way bigger than ours. And let’s not forget he only kept Villa up the first season due to a goalline tech fail. Given our history of turning against even successful managers who play crap football, I think patience will last only so long. The only manager we’ve had who has managed to get us playing in a fun way and be successful in nearly 30 years is Lambert. Smith’s got a way to go to achieve that.
The reason the fans turned on Hooton was mainly due to his inability to try new systems , players and terrible substitutions like bringing on defenders 2-0 down for the last 10 minutes Smith is not afraid to tinker or even put 3 strikers on , change formations etc. Under Smith our full backs are defenders not wingers and we look more solid .
