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| Just as we all predicted (photo by Joe Toth) |
BACK in 2016, my beloved soccer club, the Canaries of Norwich City F.C., were relegated from the Premier League for the second time in three years. The club chose to take the same approach to their 2016-2017 campaign in the English Championship, aka Division Two, as they done two seasons before: maintain the same basic core of players in hopes of immediately bouncing back up to the EPL.
This strategy does seem good in theory: if you have enough guys who were good enough to compete at the highest level, and win a few games here or there, they should be good enough to compete, and even thrive, against the “lesser” competition of the second division. In practice, however, it’s something of a risky proposition. For starters, if you’re bad enough to be relegated, you’re probably not as good as you thought you were, and if you don’t make it back up to the EPL in the following season, you’re stuck with a whole bunch of fringe players on more-than-fringe wages while lacking the means with which to pay for them.
Norwich had managed to successfully pull off this yo-yo strategy in 2015, defeating Middlesborough 2:0 at Wembley in “the richest game in football” to rise back up to the EPL, only to find themselves back in the dregs once again after a dismal 2015-16 EPL campaign. Only this time, they got it wrong. Despite having the most potent offense in the Championship in 2017, Norwich finished 8th, thanks to a defense that couldn’t stop anyone. This result was a disaster, and was followed by a necessary amount of staff turnover and roster churn.
For the 2017-18 season, new boss Stuart Webber hired Daniel Farke, a Klopp disciple from Borussia Dortmund with a background in player development, to be the manager. Farke’s first season at Carrow Road was, well, not very good: the Canaries finished in 14th place, couldn’t score, and were frustrating as all hell to watch. There was some good young talent there, and there were a few good moments among the many bad quarters of an hour, but the season was pretty dismal. Norwich City were now mired in the middle of the muck that is the Championship, which is a very, very bad place to be.
The Championship is one of the most demanding and difficult leagues on earth. The 46-game schedule is brutal, no one wants to be there, everyone is in a bad mood and has a chip on their shoulder. There is good talent in the Championship, but not necessarily squad depth, so a club’s results can be all over the place during such a long season, and the results are wildly unpredictable. The league is littered with formerly great clubs in search of past glory: the 24 clubs in this season’s Championship have 25 topflight titles between them, and have collectively spent 177 seasons in the Premier League since its inception in 1992. The Championship is a bastion of broken dreams, with many of those aforementioned clubs having run themselves into deep debt, if not near financial ruin, in an attempt to stay relevant. Just this season alone in the Championship, Bolton Wanderers – one of Britain’s oldest clubs – have seen their players go on strike, after not being paid for over a month, and had home matches cancelled or jeopardized due to the club’s inability to pay for basics such as concessions and security, while another club, Birmingham City, were docked nine points in the standings for continuing to amass unacceptable levels of debt. The Championship can be a dark, dark place.
And the outlook for Norwich City after its second season back in Championship football was, shall we say, not promising. All of the Premier League money was now gone. There wasn’t much left over in the budget to buy new players. Whatever money would be available would have to come through sales – and, sure enough, the two best players from a season ago, James Maddison and Josh Murphy, were sold off to EPL clubs in the summer (the former for £22m to Leicester City, where he was immediately slotted into the first XI and reminded all of us Norwich fans weekly just how fucking good he is), while their Man City loanee goalkeeper, Angus Gunn, found himself a permanent home with Southampton in the topflight. The focus, in 2018-19, was going to be on player development and rebuilding, and patience would be required. They were not among the betting favorites at the start of the season and, among the fan base, there were zero expectations.
City’s start to this season was, shall we say, inauspicious? That is a nice way of putting it. The Canaries lost three of their first five games, the third of which being an embarrassing 0:3 home loss to Leeds United. The defense was shipping goals and the offense was disjointed. The whole thing was a mess. If it was possible to underachieve zero expectations, Norwich was achieving it. It was not going well.
Okay, so, now what?
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| Mario Vrančić: £650,000 worth of genius (photo by Adam Holt Action Images) |
Well, clearly, the solution to the offensive woes is to hand the keys to some 21-year-old Argentine kid plucked off a La Liga bench for £1.5 million in the offseason, and have him try to pick out a pass for some journeyman Finnish striker acquired on a free transfer from the Danish league. Ah, yeah, that should work well. And then, in order to fix the defense, how about you stick a 21-year-old at one fullback spot, and then stick a 19-year-old at the other fullback spot, and then take another 21-year-old, who was playing midfield in the third division last season, and convert him into a central defender on the fly. That should work, right?
It was about this point where most of us Norwich faithful were thinking, “so, um, does Daniel Farke know what he’s doing?”
Well, after losing three of their first five games in the Championship, the Canaries have now lost three of their last forty!
Those two young fullbacks, Jamal Lewis and Max Aarons, were named to the Championship’s Team of the Season, with Aarons being named the league’s Young Player of the Year. Also joining them on the Team of the Season is Teemu Pukki, the free agent Finnish striker, who was named the MVP of the league after scoring 28 goals – a good number of which being set up by their Argentine playmaker, Emiliano Buendia, who proved so indispensable that Norwich didn’t win a single game all season that he missed. Meanwhile, that converted center back, Ben Godfrey, has gone in a calendar year from being a Shrewsbury Town loanee to wearing the colors of England’s U-21s, and has started drawing interest from a few of the EPL’s bigger clubs. (You can’t have him.)
So, as we Norwich faithful were saying all along, “this Daniel Farke guy, he’s a genius!”
Quite simply, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Literally no one saw this coming. It came straight out of left field. Not only was the club not expecting this to happen, in some ways they were counting on it not happening. I mean, they halved the budget this season. It’s become a spendthrift operation in an attempt to balance the books. The first XI cost a whopping £5.6m to assemble and includes four free transfers and three products of their academy. The notion of losing six matches the entire season with this squad seems inconceivable:
But this serves as a good reminder, to those of us who root for minnows or lesser sides, that you can, in fact, do more with less. There are good players out there, but you have to go and find them. Lest we forget, Leicester City winning the Premier League was made possible by the club beating the bushes on the backroads of France and discovering two future EPL Players of the Year. Does it always work? Of course not! Nothing works every time! But it can be done, and when you got nothing in the bank account to spend, you have to go this route, and trust in your recruitment and your coaching staff to maximize the potential of the players you’ve got.
After kicking off the month of September with a 1:1 draw against Ipswich Town – who are trash, by the way – the Canaries then start to win. Norwich rattles off six games unbeaten, which makes you think, “yeah, this is okay, they’re playing some good stuff here, this is fun.” Then they run off 12 more unbeaten and, at this point, you cannot help but start to believe.
It’s during this 12-game unbeaten run that some truly weird stuff starts to happen. Against Milwall, they’re up 2-1 after 80’ and then find themselves down 3-2 after 90’ and score two goals in extra time to win 4:3. They beat Bolton on a 93’ goal and then, in one of the most ludicrous games I’ve ever seen, trail Nottingham Forest 3-0 after 74’ and then score three to level it, two in stoppage time and one of those in the 98th minute. They never give up, and they pull one result from the fire after another. It feels a little bit like it is somehow destined. It’s as if they’ve forgotten how to lose.
Not only does Norwich forget how to lose, but the football is fantastic. “We want to be the protagonists,” is how Farke describes his philosophy, in a wonderful turn of phrase. As I said, Farke is a Klopp disciple, and Norwich’s play has decidedly Liverpoolesque qualities to it: high-press, high-tempo, play from the back and use the entirety of the pitch, possess the ball and pass the opposition right off the park. It is liquid football at times, fluid and fast flowing, beautiful to watch. (Some of these goals are terrific, with #11 and #16 being absolute beauties.) The Canaries have also been tireless and tenacious, attacking relentlessly. They attack and attack and attack some more, wearing down the opposition. Norwich have scored more goals after the 70th minute than any team in English football, including eight goals scored in stoppage time.
And, of course, a team that possesses both a flair for the dramatic and seeming senses of both invincibility and inevitability makes for an easy watch and an even easier sell. Norwich already has a fantastic fan base, passionate and devoted, one which will still sell out home games even in the second division, and yet it is also a patient and forgiving fan base. We all know what the club is up against in terms of finances, we’re all realistic, but we still want good football and good entertainment, and this team gives you bang for the buck. The club is young and fun, they play with great passion and imagination, the action is end-to-end and they score a tonne of goals – 2nd most goals in any season in club history. Over the course of the season, the fan base has become as energized as it’s been in decades in response to the Canaries’ continued rise in the Championship table. Not only are the home matches selling out, but as many as 5,000 fans are traveling to away games.
And the wins just kept on coming. The Canaries started off 2019 with another 6-game unbeaten run in the Championship, including hammering Leeds 3:1 away to vault to the top of the table. They then lost at Preston North End on Feb. 13 … and haven’t lost since. The loss to Preston was followed by eight successive victories, they had a firm grasp on first place, and promotion to the Premier League is within sight …
… And then it got weird again, although it got weird in the other direction. Four successive draws followed, featuring an abundance of the maddening circumstances we both love and hate about the game: a 2:2 draw in which Norwich dominates and Reading does absolutely nothing but produces all of two good chances the entire game, one of which in stoppage time, and both of which happen to go in; a 1:1 draw at Wigan in which a ball takes a fluky bounce off a defender and hits his arm, thus conceding a penalty; another 2:2 draw in which Sheffield Wednesday scores a wonder goal from 35 yards out and then scores another when an offside striker knocks the ball in with his arm, and yet somehow the referee doesn’t see it (another game where Norwich leaves it late, equalizing at 97’ on this gorgeous Vrančić free kick); and then yet another 2:2 draw at Stoke, with Norwich conceding the equalizer when the defender slips and falls. At this point, the fan base is getting nervous. “Oh no, they’re going to fuck this up, aren’t they? They’re going to bottle this.”
But that’s football. Weird shit happens in this game. Over the course of the season, you’re going to both take and drop some points you don’t deserve. And recency bias drastically colors your outlook and opinions, of course. If you’d told me, after those dismal first five games of the season, that come Game #45, Norwich would have 88 points and be in first place, I’d have taken it. If you’d told me after 40 games, when Norwich already had 84 points, that come Game #45, Norwich would have 88 points and be in first place, I’d have been annoyed at their inability to finish the job. “88 points? Fuck that! They should have 96 fucking points and be taking victory laps after every match while smoking stogies! Damn this team of chokers vra vra vra!” Big picture, everything was fine.
And then a well-timed collapse by Leeds United helped to ease the way, as Leeds suffered a couple of shock defeats in recent weeks. Going into the penultimate game, Norwich were six points clear of 3rd-place Leeds, needing only a draw against Blackburn Rovers to seal Premier League promotion. I’ll let Fin Stevens, the best and funniest among a wide range of wacky online Norwich City pundits, provide the proper commentary:
— Fin Stevens (@fin131) April 28, 2019
Holy smokes, that actually happened. The modest, mid-sized club on a shoestring budget is now, improbably, in the Premier League.
Okay, so, now what? Well, to be honest, next year is probably going to suck. The Premier League is unkind to newcomers. They’ll probably lose, and lose a lot, which is good for my business but bad for my psyche. It’s easy to say “oh, they need to buy some players,” but after three years beating around in Div 2, it’s hard to know who is and isn’t good enough to play on your roster that you currently have. My hope is that they keep playing the kids, who are young and hungry and talented, but occasionally still a bit naïve, particularly when it comes to defending. Play the kids, let them screw up, let them get better. I would rather they do that then trot out a bunch of AAAA minor leaguers. My guess is that they will still be pretty cautious, and let’s be honest here, trying to figure out what to do after being surprisingly promoted to the Premier League is a nice problem to have. But lots of teams get it wrong, and find themselves right back down in the Championship a season later. One of last year’s promoted sides, Fulham, is already toast, and a second, Cardiff City, is likely to sink as well. (Which will make for some fun Welsh derbies for the Swans fan in the household to watch next season.) When you get right down to it, it’s probably not going to go very well.
But you know what? Who cares? This has been the most fun goddamn season of watching this sport that I can ever remember, and doing horrible in the Premier League would never take that away. It’s been so much fun that, for 90 minutes every weekend, I’ve been able to crawl out from under the haze of mental illness which has plagued me for the past few months – the primary reason for me not writing on this blog – and feel joy, one which comes from simply enjoying the game, enjoying the beauty of it, enjoy seeing how a spark is rekindled between a club and its fans. It’s been an incredible ride, and a most unexpected one. I am much the better for permitting myself to go along for the ride.
Oh yeah, and free tacos! I had a season-long wager with my wife, a Swansea fan, and world’s greatest postman Mike “Words with” Frentz, a Stoke fan, on whose team would finish highest in the Championship table. Loser buys the tacos – except that, if one team gets promoted, then both of the others buy. Double tacos for me! I cannot handle all of this success. I may have to write about the San Francisco Giants or some other god awful team after this. I am off my game.
