"Hooper is a fat bastard and should be tied to a treadmill for 2 weeks, very unprofessional".- that made me laugh coffee out of my mouth. I went to the West Ham game and was really surprised at the size of him. I am amazed that he has simply does not seem to have put the work in over the break to try to force himself into the first team. A huge disappointment for me as he looks a class player when he does actually get on the park.
Not very detailed but a fair bit of commentary that gets the facts right... http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/norwich-pr...signing-underlines-survival-prospects-1514075
I agree he is not great on TV. But his team of the week on the website is a good read and he is prepared to recognise a good performance from players who do notplay for the usual media favourites.
Alright, he's a bit air headed and tends to spend more time playing devils advocate than actually expressing his own opinions, but at least he actually tries to discuss the "Less fashionable" teams in depth and doesn't just follow the formulae of pretty much every other pundit. Maybe it's just that MotD has sunk so low my standards have dropped. I actually fully retract my statement now, Pat Nevin is usually the only good thing about MotD.
Apart from their predicted line-up being nonsense, this is a better effort: http://tbrfootball.com/norwich-city-201516-premier-league-season-preview/? I'm hoping Neil pins all of these predictions of relegation on the wall in the dressing room at Colney, and the players prove every one wrong.
I was about to post that - yep it's not bad though they have at least understood the players there and the comments are fair. Personally I think we should be aiming for more like at least eight points from our opening six fixtures and with three home games against relegation strugglers (maybe exclude Stoke actually) 9/10 points might actually be more in order. Fair comments on the prediction, even though I disagree! Apart from teaming Grabban and Jerome up front, I don't think the line-up is far wrong - we still don't know whether Wisdom will be in ahead of Whittaker nor whether Olsson is fit to start. I think it is back to Lambert levels of cluelessness about the line-ups!
It was the midfield in that prediction which I disagreed with most. A 4-4-2 pairing Johnson and Howson in midfield seems pretty unlikely.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens with Johnson once Olsson is fit and Brady moves to LW or LM.
http://www.football365.com/afc-bournemouth/9935755/The-Promoted-Clubs-Who-What-Where-And-How-Good- Some effort has been put in here, with some fair comments on Norwich (I believe, though am not sure, that the author is a Leeds fan btw). A big theme with these more detailed opinion pieces, where they've actually done their homework, is this analysis: this is substantially the same team that got relegated a season ago, therefore we can't see how they will stay up this time round. The counter-argument to that is easy - we should have stayed up the previous season with the squad we had. Some commentators are making that point too, though far fewer. Equally, though, the reality is that we haven't invested as much as our fellow promoted teams and we didn't win the Championship at a canter. I'm still feeling tentatively optimistic about this season, personally, because I think this squad is going to play to the maximum of its capabilities under Neil, whereas I think under Hughton it rarely got out of third gear.
Case in point: http://www.footballtradedirectory.com/news/2015/august/premier-league-preview-newcastle-norwich.html
In both cases, the assumption seems to be that teams will survive because of goals scored by their strikers, though the first does acknowledge BJ's 15 goals last year. AN's approach is to get midfielders into the box to score goals and that's why the single striker. Much will depend on the goals scored by BJ, Wes, Howson, Brady, Redmond, Mulumbu, Dorrans and Odjidja-Ofoe on top of those which come from strikers. This is what the pundits haven't allowed for, IMO.
This has some decent insight and some fair comments. http://www.theguardian.com/football...-league-2015-2016-bournemouth-norwich-watford I actually think this is spot on as the one thing I have got increasingly concerned about is that while I am positive we started at a better point than our fellow relegation battlers, we haven't added quite the same quality of players, other than maybe Mulumbu (who has typically got himself injured). Obviously, those other teams still need the quality to shine through whereas our signings have been much safer bets, but it is still concerning. The only thing I would disagree with is that Martin and Bassong lack pace. They're not rapid, but they both have reasonable pace and Martin in particular is very agile and has excellent movement - I think the real concern with them is when Martin comes up against brute strength and height rather than pace/movement.
Our 8 defender unit which most teams work on is currently Olsson, Brady, Martin, Bassong, Turner, Bennett, Whittaker and Wisdom. So there's enough players, but I agree quality is the concern. A long term injury to Bassong or Martin leaves us playing either someone we didn't think was good enough last season, relying on the seemingly perennially crocked Bennett, or trusting Wisdom in a role he wants but has little experience of.
