Those of you that wonder about AN's abilities, this cheered me no end! http://www.pinkun.com/norwich-city/...king_to_step_it_up_at_norwich_city_1_3939187?
he needs time to get it right, we just need to accept that bar a miracle its too late to get a top two place and best will be a top 6, but if he can deliver a solid defence but continue to develop a better attack using Hooper nt Grabban we will be ok. To be fair though if by some tweak of fate we managed to get up would we be ready, all the teams I have seen this year including us could do no better than Leicester are doing right now and that would be a tad depressing for the Canary callers
Get a bit of weight off Seb, and get his head right, he´s still easily our best CB - great to see that he´s been invited back into the fold.
Have to agree,there is no outstanding team in the Championship, and whoever gets promoted will probably get hammered week in week out. I really do not miss the Prem,with the exception of being able to stream away games.
Agreed Jarrold. I said on another thread that I would rather we didn't get promoted this season, but use the rest of this and next season to develop some of our more promising youth squad (Toffolo and McGeehan seem to be doing well). I'm sure that comment will raise hoots of derision!!!
Dont see there should be a rush to get promoted, it cant be about money with all the money we earnt last year it was reported if we had stayed up we would have made a loss!, maybe to stay in the PL for any length of time you really do need stupidly ( probably illegally or immorally) rich owners as even with the extra income the cash required to keep a squad able to compete on a regular basis is way beyong us in my opinion , so we need to develop from our great crop of youth players, get up there when we can but accept that cant be maintained for too long, just look at the bottom half of the PL again Sunderland WBA Vilea Hull etc if we had stayed up we would have been firmly planted amongst them for sure
I seem to be agreeing with a lot today but these comments again are in my view spot on. It is a crying shame but the true sport has been destroyed with the ridiculous wage structures in the Prem where even clubs like Newcastle are very much second division and lose their leading players to the 'top' 6 clubs, so on that basis what chance Norwich? Southampton's efforts over the last two years have been extraordinary particularly when they were picked apart in the closed season. That said, what do you do when you are in our position? If you stay put that is not good enough in many ways, but promotion leads to the inevitable kicking several times a year from sides that are international X1's. I do miss the days of the 70's when the playing field was more level but agents have killed that notion completely.
Southampton of course have benefited from a highly respected & sucessful youth system. Given the recent investment in our youth system there's no reason why we couldn't do a Southampton. Our clubs are similar in many ways.
Agreed. I said more or less the same a few days ago and let's hope we can unearth some gems in the coming years. Certainly McGeehan has been impressive for Cambridge United and I've heard very good reports of Toffolo at Swindon.
I'm very sceptical of our youth system producing the players Southampton have. Even the cup winning side was essentially a bit of a long ball outfit. I would imagine a few years of Championship football may ebb away at the importance for category A status.
Its not the agents driving the wages up, its the money the teams get from the Premier League, Champions League. Its all the people who buy Sky, they are the people driving it up. All the agents do is react. You are forgetting also, before the Premier League, Newcastle were not competing for anything, Their gates in the eighties/ early nineties were comparable to ours before its inception and they were rarely a top six side (if ever during that period). Promoted teams got hidings before the Premier League, its not a new thing. It was the Premier League money that got us out of jail to leave us debt free. And many of the games I see from the seventies/ eighties are just frantic long ball affairs, crap quality on muddy pitches, no marking. I really do not like all this money being the root of all football evil and how its ruined football. We rarely got to see the best players in the World before because they were all in Spain, Brazil, Italy etc.
Having personally seen Southampton's youth facilities at close quarters I can sadly say that they are light years ahead of us. Theirs is up there with the very best in world football. It would take an astonishingly vast outlay and many, many years to catch them up. We can compete with many clubs but not them. And as I've said before, that youth cup win has pulled the wool over a few peoples eyes. It was a tremendous achievement - any cup win is - but check out their league results that season. Also rans. Expect the unexpected in cup football. I'm not slating those players - clearly there are a number of that side who will go on to have good careers in league football, maybe one or two will play regular Premier League football - but it is wrong to expect many to make the breakthrough here unless we suddenly run out of cash. We need to keep improving the coaching behind the scenes but it will take many years to establish any kind of real progress that we get to see on a Saturday afternoon.
So your saying that the market has driven a rise in wages, isn't that how everyone's wages rise? Whether you like it or not, football is the worlds best adverting industry. 650,000,000 people watched Man City play Chelsea. Once 120m watched the Super Bowl (the so called largest sporting event in the world, my arse) 2 billion people watch the World Cup final. The advertising at these games is seen by more people world wide in a single second than in literally any other situation conceivable. As a result companies will pay vast sums of money to advertise on it. The popularity on that scales is why people pay to see it on television. If you do something that a 10th of the world population want to see why shouldn't you get paid accordingly. And given that we all love the game so much we spend our weekdays and evening discussing something that happens for an hour and a half once a week. We'd be hypocrites to say that all those people shouldn't be interested.
Yes but it is the agents who have But the agents are expoiting the Sky money for themselves and not the betterment of the game as a whole, that is the problem. 70's games were not hoof and hope, far from it, they were often free flowing and ultimately very enjoyable. In those days Norwich were beating man Utd, Liverpool, Leeds and Arsenal so no, a lot has changed and largely for the worse.
It's not only Sky, but BTsport and ESPN as well. On the plus side though, that's where the streams come from.
Sky etc are bidding as high as they are because they make so much from it they dare not lose the rights so every time it's up for renewal crazy money gets lobbed around. It's a vicious circle that's probably impossible to break now, might have been if Sky hadn't been allowed to effectively kill of competitors like BSB, I also wouldn't be surprised if NDS were involved in the On Digital hacking scene which put them out of business.
