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"Thumbs For Heads" ACN Pod 91
43 Plays2 years ago
Matthew & Edie join the Nodgecasters to reflect on the latest run, well, jog, of performances and comment on the existential crisis happening at a club just 4 points from safety.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Goals
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to the Long Come Knowledge podcast. I've got a familiar feeling flowing through my bones, but only four points could make me feel so much more frivolity. You join us as we look back on a period of, well, it's the same as last time we joined you really with shit. So we've got Edie and Matthew along and alongside me and John to see if we can find some positivity or maybe just dive into a bit of the negativity.
Norwich City Challenges and 2016 Referendum Parallel
00:00:47
Speaker
Starting with you, Edie, there's a lot of talk about models. There's a lot of talk about whether or not we can ever enjoy ourselves in the Premier League. Sum up your feelings over the Christmas period into the New Year period and how we seem to be treading water.
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think, well, it's all of the changes that done occurred. Everyone was very much like, something must be done. And then something was done. And then it's like a kind of
00:01:20
Speaker
I think everyone thought, much as they did during the 2016 referendum, that some sort of dramatic change was better than sticking with what we had.
Transfer Window Limitations and Recent Performance
00:01:32
Speaker
And I think it's at the moment still, I'm probably repeating myself, but just this sort of hodgepodge of people popping in and out, trying their best, maybe not trying their best, someone else being popped in, someone else getting injured.
00:01:47
Speaker
And it just feels like nothing I can wrap my head around as like a hole. If I was to hover up above it, I still can't make sense of any of it. And I know there's going to be all sorts of like, I don't know what else they can do really at this stage. The transfer window is largely
00:02:07
Speaker
closed in terms of has never been open for Norwich. And at least I can say yesterday's game was not smelly. That's my big positive headline.
00:02:18
Speaker
Okay, so Matthew, building on Hodgepodge City and yesterday's game not being smelly, let's look at the West Ham performance in inverted commas. Are you feeling more positive now we've got a couple of injuries or injured players back? Where were you at Matthew? I mean more positive than I was after watching the Arsenal game.
00:02:44
Speaker
It is obviously better that we've got Reshitsa back and Pookie, I thought, had a better game. But across the field, we're not good enough to beat 15 or 16 of the teams in the Premier League.
00:02:59
Speaker
And that's probably not going to change dramatically between now and the end of the season. So we played better last night, but we played well enough to beat Man United and couldn't. We played well enough to beat Burnley, if you remember, back to that game and didn't. And we're not good enough.
Current Struggles and COVID Impact
00:03:18
Speaker
And that's really
00:03:19
Speaker
grim and it's annoying and it's depressing but I think that's probably the reality of how this season is going to end. We just have to trudge through the rest of it before we get that confirmed.
00:03:30
Speaker
Well, John, trudge is a fantastic word that Matthew's used there. We'll drill into specifically the transfer window in a second and also, like I said, the model of the ownership that we've got. But just give us a quick overview. What are the headlines of how things are at Punt HQ in terms of positivity or where you think we're at? It's all pretty grim, I think.
00:03:59
Speaker
Look, there was a little bit more purpose to last night's performance and I was lucky enough to not watch it all because I was at my daughter's football training instead and that was infinitely more enjoyable. But the highlights that I have caught, it looks like there was a bit more purpose about our play. It looked like there was a bit more zip.
00:04:16
Speaker
And that's the tricky thing for me is that, you know, I don't think all hope is lost because there are four dreadful teams in this division at the moment. And, you know, look, it's still entirely plausible that we could be the best of those four absolutely shite teams. Is it plausible? And I think is it plausible? I think it is. So so I'm not it's a long shot.
00:04:41
Speaker
But what I would say is that actually that there was mitigation around the five, six, seven game winless streak that we've had in so much as, look, there's been COVID infections and big injuries to big personnel and Norwich have a threadbare squad at the best of times, that's intentional.
Recovery Potential and Squad Limitations
00:05:00
Speaker
I don't think that they anticipated that COVID would be as prevalent this time around, and maybe that's a failure to prepare, but at the same time, it is an issue.
00:05:10
Speaker
How unlucky are we with injuries? So I think with a fair wind, I know we probably won't get necessarily into the model, if you like, and can it work and can't it work? Because I'm sure we'll talk about that a bit later. But with a fair wind and some decent recruitment, I'm not so sure that we'd be as far away as perhaps we'd have like, I think we'd have probably been much closer to some teams that we were at the moment, but we're not.
00:05:39
Speaker
So the reality is, we look devoid of confidence, we look devoid of ideas going forward. We look devoid of a midfield engine room. And you know, maybe that's something to do with Matthias Norman as injury. But you need all three of those things to have any kind of semblance of a chance of staying in the Premier League. So we need to get that back. But I felt like
00:05:59
Speaker
Dean Smith's arrival had kind of ignited something and we did look a bit more purposeful and we were playing with a bit more verve and we did look like we were capable of grinding out results when we had somewhere near our best 11 and whatever that might be or you know kind of a fairly fit squad.
00:06:19
Speaker
to choose from. We were competitive against Wolves, we were really competitive in the second half against Southampton. We gave Manchester United a really decent game and maybe the benefit of hindsight shows that that wasn't pulling up any trees. But at the same time, we could have easily got three points in that game and then actually we're only one point off it and everyone probably feels a bit more positive.
00:06:43
Speaker
All is not lost, but at the same time, something needs to change really, really quickly.
Football Club as a Business Analogy
00:06:50
Speaker
Well, that's kind of my issue with the positivity of feeling like, because I keep coming back to the fact that four points is so, you know, you can win that in a week in a Premier League, you can win that in four days in the Premier League. It's such a narrow margin. And if you'd have asked me in early October or
00:07:09
Speaker
Even, you know, mid-November, how many points from safety do you think Norwich will become, you know, the 13th of January as we record this? I'm probably with a tape bitten your hand off at four. You know, I'd be amazed we're within that quality of touching distance. And it would make me think that the teams around us must have continued their poor form, which they have. My issue is with the very last thing you said, John, which is, you know, things need to change.
00:07:37
Speaker
And that's where I have the real struggle. I think that taking the context of COVID and injuries aside, even knowing that financially we spent as much as we thought we could at the start of the season, and yes, it makes sense to try and spend as much as you can rather than save some for halfway through, even with that in mind, the point is we do still have players. We have players that we could get fees for.
00:08:07
Speaker
You need to change something. We keep getting told that the football is like a business when it suits the club to tell us that the football is like a business or when it suits, it's not Norwich's fault. Whenever a football club has to make a difficult decision or a decision that they think might not make the fans happy, they kind of lean on the analogy that, yeah, but we are a business and sometimes you have to make difficult business decisions.
00:08:28
Speaker
I love it when a football club does that because that's actually where I can start to say, right, well, I can scrutinize this because I've worked in businesses, I run businesses, so I understand business probably a lot better than I understand running a football club because I've never done that. So I love it when they use the business analogy. And in that kind of analogy and in that world where we're thinking of Norwich City Football Club as a business, in which business
00:08:51
Speaker
Would you have, for example, a sales team that cannot convert the opportunities that are brought to them, or a marketing team that are not generating enough opportunities for that sales team to close? So if someone tweeted it only a little while ago,
00:09:07
Speaker
And I quote tweeted effectively exactly this, which is that, you know, since Norwich last scored a Premier League goal, Everton scored a, Watford scored four, Newcastle four, etc. We are not creating enough good chances. We are not converting those chances.
00:09:24
Speaker
That is so plainly obvious to see. I mean,
Tactical and Personnel Issues
00:09:27
Speaker
I watched them more than the game last night than I would have liked to. Unfortunately, my eldest does football on Thursdays and Saturdays, so I didn't have an excuse. And it was really frustrating how plainly the commentary team, who I actually thought did a really even-handed job on it,
00:09:45
Speaker
the ones that I got on what I was watching. Effectively saying, Norwich is so easy to deal with in attack that the final ball is so devoid of quality. He had a purple patch just before he was taken off, which is a bizarre decision. So unless there was, he was on a limited number of minutes that the team said that he was allowed to do or whatever, I don't know, because medical team maybe said that he wasn't able to do 75 minutes because he looked like
00:10:14
Speaker
the one team, one player was leading the charge. But aside of that, it was just so obvious that we are so easy to play against, we're so easy to defend against, we don't create the right frequency of chances. And again, going back to the business analogy, you simply can't run a business making the same mistake again and expecting, or rather do what's not working and expect it to just suddenly change overnight. If we continue with the personnel that we've got, and I know we might get a couple back, but
00:10:42
Speaker
Other than Norman, Campwell hasn't really done it when he's been in and we know that there's issues outside of that from a relationship point of view between the club and the player and I'm on the side of the player and I don't care what anyone else thinks. From the information I've got, I'm on the side of the player on that one.
00:11:04
Speaker
So who else is kind of waiting in the wings to suddenly come back? Rashida had a bit of an impact, although he wasn't great last night. A couple of really poor missed hit passes, which is why I think he got hooked. Just not looking up, just playing the ball willy-nilly into midfield and going straight to one of their defenders. I thought West Ham were excellent in the midfield last night.
00:11:24
Speaker
So yeah, I just can't see without changing it, personnel wise, why isn't it? And that might mean that you have to sell someone who is one of our better players in order to get a loan fee available or send back and cancel a loan that we've got in order to use that slot elsewhere.
00:11:40
Speaker
sell a good player and buy two medium players because I literally just think if you stick with what we've got when we are still so feasibly close you know from a logistical point of view the number of points we need currently to keep pace with the number of games that are left
00:11:58
Speaker
This is the type of window where twisting is exactly what you should do. We're not 19 points adrift. You know, it isn't, it's not Mars way. And actually defensively, we do actually look better. I think this time than the last time we were up. Yes, we can see goals every week. And I know that there was the five nil and that was, that was abysmal, you know, off days happen, what have you, but I do think generally we do seem slightly more, slightly harder to score against only slightly, but it's slightly, but slightly better than it was last time we were up.
00:12:27
Speaker
So how you can't think we need another attacking midfielder, a 10 or someone in the three behind, how you can think we can't, we don't bring in someone else to challenge Pookie, play alongside Pookie, be an alternative to Eda. I just, I can't see how that is logical that you can do that. We do have to do that. We do have to do that. And you're right. You know, we, we as fans say to the players, win, lose or draw. What we want to see is fight.
00:12:54
Speaker
And that's how I feel about this transfer window. We might be going down, but if we are, I don't want it to be because we were too cautious in this window, but because we did what we could to go at it. Now, we don't have loads of money lying around in order to do that. I'm not saying that we want Delia to mortgage all her houses or whatever. We have to be, to some extent, realistic. But the answer is in what you just said. Cantwell isn't playing for us anymore.
00:13:22
Speaker
He doesn't want to, or he can't, or whatever. I don't have the sources you have. But either way, I can see with my own eyes that he is not playing for us.
Strategic Transfer Decisions
00:13:30
Speaker
Therefore, we should cash in. I'd be quite happy, as much as I'd hate to lose Max, I'd be quite happy in order to generate some cash because we have to do something in this window. In order to do that, we have to sell, and Cantwell and Max are the obvious examples of what we do that. Now, if we do that and then we go down, then fine. I'd rather that we struggled next year,
00:13:51
Speaker
because we took some risks in this window, but we can't just, I don't want to trash through the rest of the season any more than anyone else, but it does require us to take some risks. Let's jump to one of the questions that we've got with some fantastic questions in today, a really good mix.
00:14:08
Speaker
and the fact that things are a bit depressing and things feel a little bit deflating and people are maybe a little bit angry is maybe why we got so many questions that were actually really good football kind of would you rather and hypothetical questions rather than you know what's your favorite lettuce and some of the stuff we sometimes get which we enjoy but
00:14:27
Speaker
and maybe not as much as some of the better football ones. One of them, John, was along the lines, do the one about what would you prefer in the next two seasons, because I think that's relevant to what Matthew's saying there, and you saying, you know, if we sell someone like a max in order to get a midfielder and another defender in a midfielder and an attacker in a whatever,
00:14:49
Speaker
then that means we might struggle next year if it doesn't work. I think we're gonna struggle next year with this squad because of how deflated and how broken the relationship is currently between the team and the players. It's gonna take a lot of wins. It's gonna take a really good start to the season to get that back. And I'm not sure we've got the squad currently and the vibe in the squad currently to do that in the championship. So I don't actually think it's a problem risking making a big change like that
00:15:16
Speaker
because I think we're going to struggle next year anyway. So yeah, what was that question, John? Would you like me to ask the question? Yes, please, babe. Thank you. It's from Jack Wiseman on Twitter and he asks, looking ahead to the next two seasons, would you rather A, a barnstorming run to the championship title followed by another meek relegation, or B, two seasons of nearly but not quite in the championship? So you go first, Edie.
00:15:43
Speaker
If there was a kind of choice of going with them, the relegation, then the barnstorming and then the meganess, I don't want to prefer that because I'm not particularly kind of fond of this sort of reputation that Norwich has on a wider basis for doing such a thing. But maybe that's what's required just to give everyone
00:16:12
Speaker
what's the phrase, a safe space to just actually build some more relationships again. And I remember saying at the beginning of all of this that going up against those four big teams right at the beginning of the season might be an opportunity for bonding and loss. Obviously, clearly that's not a successful strategy. So maybe it's bonding
00:16:39
Speaker
in winning for a bit, going down the shallow end of the pool, splashing about a bit, getting some inflatables, then kind of slowly getting a confidence to kind of come back and yeah, maybe be a bit mediocre again, but these things are just, this has the potential to be like a 10-year roadmap, not just a season-on-season roadmap where the arrow just carries on going up and up and up.
00:17:02
Speaker
I'm happy to go back to the first chapter again, I think. Even knowing you can only have that if you basically live this experience again guaranteed next time.
Future Performance Preferences - Success or Stability?
00:17:12
Speaker
Because that's the point of the would you rather. You have to have this empty soulless barely raising an eyebrow when we can see the goal because it's so obvious again. I do sort of feel like at the moment there's a kind of lack of experience that is informing a lot of quite random Hail Mary decisions.
00:17:33
Speaker
So that's my thinking on that. And I don't like it. I don't like that that's what I would choose. When you say the experience, do you mean in the leadership of the club? Because in your analogy, the option you've picked there, then presuming the leadership of the club is similar, the people making those Hail Mary decisions, that will then be three recruitment failures, three relegations will be on their CV.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, well, in terms of the actual office leadership, I don't think I have very much faith left in that area. I'm sort of thinking more about human minds learning to kind of read each other's minds if you see what I mean.
00:18:16
Speaker
because of just the amount of relative strangers that are being kind of... Yeah, but again, in that scenario, you're right, that would be winning in the championship brings that together. But the reason I loved this question so much is something you touched on early doors there, Edie.
00:18:33
Speaker
I'm so fed up of being sniggered at. I'm so fed up of Norwich being in the limelight if being in the limelight means that we are a laughingstock. I would rather be a respected top 29 club than a laughingstock top 26 club. I would much rather that. Because if you regularly finish just outside the playoffs,
00:19:03
Speaker
for a couple of seasons, which is obviously the option. You win way more games than you lose. You get to be in the championship, which is more fun. You get some awful refereeing, like genuinely dreadful refereeing, and that's kind of fun in a way. But didn't we do that for a bit? Didn't we bob along in the championship as a mid table, sometimes, you know, kind of troubling eighth or ninth?
00:19:22
Speaker
for a while. Wasn't that financially unsustainable as well? And it was shit. And I kind of think it was a bit shit. Again, this is the thing, our model means both of those options is sustainable. Yeah. And this is the, but this is why it is a beautiful question to ask. For me, I think it comes back to the principle of
00:19:41
Speaker
Why am I a football fan? And there's a couple of reasons, but one of them is that you want to see your team be successful. And another one is the community and the matchday field that going to the football brings. So the latter, I'll get that whatever.
00:19:57
Speaker
So I'm happy in that respect. But will you though? Because I don't know if we've got that in the Premier League. So the first, the former side to that is, look, I want my team to be successful. I think the moments that I will remember
Squad Depth and COVID Impact
00:20:12
Speaker
will be things like the 1819 season where we kind of romp to the title will be when we went to Wembley and and you know kind of one in the playoffs will be when we went to the playoff final will be you know that 88 89 going back to a team that that probably should have won the league 9293 you know by an insert there the moments that you remember in football I will not
00:20:31
Speaker
Well I will remember it but I won't fondly recall the 1920 season or this season. I will just try and erase those from my memory. So I would much rather have a Barnstorming title win and to celebrate that really hard come kind of next May and then have to put up with it for 12 months and it'd be a bit crap for 12 months. But I get the argument. I get the fact that people are sick of it. And for me,
00:20:59
Speaker
all right, this doesn't kind of lend itself into the question. But the model
00:21:06
Speaker
that we're currently working towards is always about incremental gains, season on season. So every time you go up, we want to be a bit better. We want to be a bit more competitive. And that's the failure this season. I don't think you can pin the season's failure on a particular person. It's a collective failure. It's way more nuanced than, oh, we haven't got enough money, or Delia's not selling enough cakes, or Stuart Weber got the recruitment wrong.
00:21:31
Speaker
it's a lot of those things altogether maybe short of I'm sure Delia sells loads of cakes but you know this season is a collective failure of management of recruitment of desire of foresight of nearly fucking everything you know like it's been it's been really poor across the board and I think we'd have had a much better fighting chance if we'd have got a few things right and we'd have been in a much better position and that's why I don't think
00:21:57
Speaker
It's unachievable under our current model to recruit really well, have a little bit of luck, have a little bit of momentum, which I think is really important and that actually we could stay up off the back of it.
00:22:10
Speaker
Yeah, I completely agree that model wise, there is no reason it can't work, but you can't have. I mean, I was thinking back to the squad we had when we stayed up. That squad would never have stayed up with the current COVID situation.
Uniting Supporters and Club Identity
00:22:31
Speaker
Because the COVID situation means that you are severely tested in terms of squad depth.
00:22:39
Speaker
And to be honest, I don't think that, you know, I don't think that had it been a full season, it may well have been that there have been other teams that have stayed up, you know, for like teams like Cuddersfield, they've stayed up for like one season or what have you.
00:22:57
Speaker
I just think when you need your, maybe you've got 14 lads who can genuinely do it at this level, if some of them play out of their skin and have the season of their lives, then you can't at any point have two or three of them missing through Covid or through close contact or through being pinged or whatever.
00:23:17
Speaker
because you just, unlike the teams that are in the top 12, 13, even teams that are, you know, mid bottom table, such as the Everton's, what have you, just the routine spending at a Premier League level means that their 17th choice player is, you know, on wages that our top choice player is aspiring to, you know, that they just have far better, the dip. Yes, of course, everyone misses, everyone is weakened by COVID and injury, but the drop off from us and, you know,
00:23:47
Speaker
So to drop down to Chemmy, Chemmy wouldn't get in any other Premier League squad, bless him. He's worked, he showed some desire and has showed more desire than some other players, but you know, so far on what we've seen, he would not be signed by an established Premier League team. And so him having to play so many games, I think it exactly sums up why we're struggling. The fact that
00:24:10
Speaker
we are still within four points, John, is why you're completely right about our model being possible to work. For the number of transfers to have gone as badly wrong as they have done this season, and to have had all of the COVID situation, and to still be a couple of wins with other things going our way out of the relegation zone, shows that it is feasible, it is possible. So do you want to move to the question on the model?
00:24:39
Speaker
I've got to find it, yeah. I think this is probably a better question, actually. I'll move to this one from Liz Howlett. And she says, what on earth do we and the club do to unite supporters? We've had an excellent and exciting times where fans were united and creative. And she kind of references the Faka rap and the nation's flags. But as she highlights, it's pretty awful at the moment. And fans are taking it out on each other and the players. Edie, where do you start with that?
00:25:10
Speaker
I don't really know because I'm really quite taken aback at sort of what's been happening of late that seems to relate almost to kind of, I might sound like I'm being slightly over dramatic here, but it feels like the beginning of the Norwich City Culture Wars.
00:25:27
Speaker
There's all sorts of weird little mini rows happening here, there and everywhere. There's all sorts of people still insisting that some, you know, weird, porny, gambling money would have saved all of our bacon and we would be top four by now had that not been the case. Despite the fact that if all the women who get sorely pissed off at matches
00:25:51
Speaker
from the behaviour of certain people around them were to not attend, the loss of revenue might also be quite an impact on club income. So it's a bit of a swirl. I can't quite make sense of it. Dean Smith kind of talking, I don't know, his comments about the sarcasm. That was an interesting step to take. Bearing in mind, this is after all Norwich and
00:26:22
Speaker
we kind of do that sort of thing in a very lovable, deprecating way. So I think there's a massive lack of confidence and identity that suddenly sprang up, which is ironic in a year that they've unveiled a new logo. But something that's been obsessing me ever since they did that was just waiting to hear them say what the identity of the club is rather than this is what our graphic looks like.
00:26:48
Speaker
Well, they have got some six core values, haven't they? Have you seen those? I think they're printed on the inside of the shirt. I know growth is one of them. Yeah. Well, what they haven't done is they've printed the logos on the shirt, but they've also released a logo publicly and promoted it, even though it hasn't actually been rolled out yet. And I think that was a really interesting time to
00:27:11
Speaker
stick your head above the parapet, add a parapet or two as well. And also just say, look, we've decided to have a bit of a tidy up, which is all well and good. But I've just I've never seen the rollout of a logo occur like that without some reaffirmation publicly stating what the club is. So I think we've got like such an amazing
00:27:32
Speaker
amount of activity going on, we've got the pride canaries, we've got a lot of mental health work that's amazing and all of that was very very prominent maybe a year or two ago and it just sort of feels now like there's some other voices coming up that are quite unexpected
00:27:49
Speaker
that are very much kind of like just going for Delia that's really really weird and bad because it's not like she's ever sought to make money off of this situation. There were so many clubs that would buy
00:28:06
Speaker
her arm off for somebody who gave that much of themselves and their pocketbook. So it's I think one of the keys to success here after a period of golden days where everyone had seemed to have a lot more cohesion and that was based on everyone telling the similar stories to each other around the campfire. At the moment there's loads of random stuff and random opinions and everything's it's very noisy.
00:28:37
Speaker
Do you think that's a failure of leadership from the club to kind of cultivate that culture or from
Ownership Model Debate and Investment Potential
00:28:42
Speaker
fans? I don't know what the answer is here. I would say I would be naughty enough to say club just because I think so much of what you see comes from the efforts of people on the ground who just love the club and they're not a stakeholder unless it's an emotional stakeholder.
00:29:02
Speaker
I think in terms of what the club itself has put out, it's this weird mix of there's been quite a few missteps that kind of speak towards looking at promoting the club based on very kinds of hygienic, identical commerce routes, as opposed to this is a really unusual brand with a very distinct personality and how can we harness that to
00:29:31
Speaker
to grow it and involve more people in it to make more money. It doesn't seem to be happening with winter wonderlands and advent calendars and weird, porny.
00:29:44
Speaker
betting sponsors. Well, that segue is nicely in to the next question that I wanted to touch on, which was from Chris Barton. And he's kind of pointed towards the fact that the blame seems to be vented towards recruitment. And there's this people that are saying, right, Stuart Weber, you need to come forward and speak up.
00:30:02
Speaker
Matthew, Chris then goes on to ask, do you think recruitment would have been much different with the BK8 funds and would he likely throw that back at the fans as he has done before or is he going to use that as an excuse moving forward? He's thrown it back at us before and I think he may well do again and to the last point he's made, it's the
00:30:28
Speaker
the communications from the club is starting to feel ever so slightly jes moxie again and i don't say that lightly because jes moxie was total nightmare um but that that some of their moves more recently have had that feeling and so it wouldn't surprise me if if that was thrown back at us but you know the reports from the club were that cancelling that sponsorship agreement cost us somewhere between three and four million pounds so we're talking about the difference between
00:30:59
Speaker
Kabak or Iyer. Iyer clearly better than Kabak, but that upgrade alone being enough to completely change our season, not a chance. If we were talking about the kind of money that would have meant that we bought in Dan Juma instead of Josh Largen, then maybe, but even then, the fundamental problem is that each time we get promoted to the Premier League, the amount of things that we need to go right
00:31:25
Speaker
grows. We need absolutely everything to go right each time we're in the Premier League for us to survive. But the number of things that we need going right is growing and growing and growing as the top teams pull away financially and we're not keeping up with them. So the idea that BK on its own would have made any substantial difference to our season whatsoever I think is nonsense.
00:31:51
Speaker
Do you think on that, that we've got the wage, also the transfer fee and the wage balance right? Because that always seems to be something that, so I've seen a lot of noise online that people are kind of pointing to, well, why didn't we look at or scout Michael Elise from Reading, or why didn't we look at Emmanuel Dennis, who's obviously worked out really well for Watford, and
00:32:13
Speaker
the answer in my mind always seems to be well actually those clubs are probably paying better wages and all right maybe geographically they're you know either in London or closer to London so that might be more desirable for a young footballer but I always come back to the fact that actually the club that pays the most in terms of wages probably gets the player if there's any kind of competition
00:32:33
Speaker
We seem to have really gone for it from a transfer fee perspective this season. I don't think anyone could deny that. And, you know, I'm sure people will point to 11th biggest spenders in Europe or, you know, whatever that figure was. But have we got it right from a wage structure point of view? And is that something that might be holding us back? And I realize that could hurt us longer term if we committed to higher wages, but just feels like that's something, you know, have we got the balance right? Tom, would you reckon?
00:33:01
Speaker
Well, I saw some responses to something that Jack Reeve put out about Todd Cantwell with regards to, they sort of went off on a tangent, but they were talking about some bigger name, free transfers that are available that are just the sorts of people that Norwich don't sign because of the wages that come with them.
00:33:22
Speaker
actually maybe an aging striker, an aging professional that would be really high on wages but we wouldn't have to pay anyone the fee upfront.
00:33:32
Speaker
and maybe they wouldn't accept the cut in their wages, maybe they wouldn't accept a kind of pay as you play or play till the end of the year contract, I don't know. But I think it goes back to what I said up the top. We tried spending a little bit and it didn't work. We tried spending as much as we possibly could, and Matthew makes a great point,
00:33:57
Speaker
which is you need nigh on 80 to 90% success rate in terms of player bought to player impact on the pitch in order for us to be able to compete regularly in the Premier League, which is a big ask for anyone. I don't agree with that, by the way. You don't have to, but I completely agree with Matthew that you do need a very high hit rate.
00:34:21
Speaker
or you can afford a very high hit rate, you can afford to have a lower hit rate on your transfers if more of your championship players step up, if you see what I mean, so it doesn't matter if Sargent can't do it, if Pookie is kind of creating enough chances for himself, it doesn't matter if Reshitsa was a flop, if Campwell hit the ground running and was playing to the best of his ability, we wouldn't need Reshitsa to beat him. And that is some mitigation about this season in so much as we have lost
00:34:44
Speaker
the best two players in yellow shirts last season from this season's lineup. I can't think of a time where we've done that before.
00:34:53
Speaker
I can't think of it. I can't think that we will do that again. Obviously, there's reasons for that. Skip was returning to his parent club, and Buendia, it just wasn't feasible for the lad to stay. But it's such a huge hole that we were left to fill. It was always going to be a hard task. And I think we were bedazzled by the numbers, the money that was being spent, and some fancy names from teams that we'd heard of before, rather than maybe some teams that we hadn't.
00:35:20
Speaker
I think we all got very excited, we all got very overexcited and we thought it was going to be different this time around. And the reason that I was just saying that I disagree slightly is I think we would have been much better, and I think Leeds probably did this slightly better than we did when they went up, to have a look at spending more money on a couple of higher-caliber players
00:35:43
Speaker
to improve the team the first 11 than actually say signing eight or nine different players and then kind of looking at improving the squad. I think maybe we needed to trust the squad that we had a bit more.
00:35:59
Speaker
But that does rely on keeping your better players as you go up as well. Do you think culturally it's hard to kick the habit of having in the back of your mind, draft and develop style approach for going back to the championship? That is the culture that has been bred at the club. You're absolutely right.
00:36:18
Speaker
Um, should we, should we have a kind of, um, self-funded model style question? My, um, my friend Ben sent me something. I've got a friend. I've got, yeah, one, you know, so, and you, I guess I can call your friend. I don't know. Um, thanks.
00:36:34
Speaker
He's asked, is this the end of the road with regards for fans' patience for the self-funded model and also a supplementary, can we see this squad mounting a serious promotion challenge next season without a major overhaul?
Delia Smith and Michael Wynn Jones Ownership Discussion
00:36:49
Speaker
Who'd like to take that question?
00:36:52
Speaker
I'll answer it briefly and then bring our guests in. Firstly, the fans have lost their patience with the ownership model whenever we're not in the position in the league they think we should be in for more than a few weeks.
00:37:12
Speaker
until there is a viable option, a viable alternative, until, let's have it right, the lads who cover, the lads on the beat, we're really lucky, and we say this again and again, but we are genuinely really lucky at Norwich, the guys that we've got covering Norwich are really good at keeping us informed about the stuff that, let's face it, sometimes the club doesn't want us to drill too much into, like the BK8 stuff,
00:37:34
Speaker
And if there was a genuine viable alternative that had been kind of battered back, I don't think the guys covering Orange City locally would have missed out on that. I think they would know if there was someone backed back. I think they would know because at the end of the day, these investors will want to put pressure on getting their deals accepted. We've seen the way that these things tend to work when other clubs are bought. It's very difficult to keep it quiet. You don't tend to just hear
00:37:57
Speaker
breaking news, so-and-so club has been sold to so-and-so bidder, no one knew anything about it until this morning, like that just doesn't happen. So I don't think there's, until you can say, saying Delia out, I mean, is moronic, one, because it's just like a pathetic catchphrase and it's not just her and they said very clearly that they're not running the club, they're not deciding whether to buy Sargent or not.
00:38:23
Speaker
So that's just silly. Saying Michael and Delia transfer your shares to X Investment Fund or this company or this rich person, okay, fair enough. If there was a genuine alternative, I still believe that the pair of them would be
00:38:47
Speaker
really open to the discussion of saying, yeah, well, let's make sure the figures work out. Let's make sure that we're not handing it off to someone who is going to harm the club long term. But I can totally see an argument for wanting them to step aside
00:39:05
Speaker
And if there was someone that we found out that on the kind of BK8 kind of grounds, they've decided aren't the sorts of people that should own Norwich. I get then when there would be vitriol, until there is that viable option that at least one of the, you know, at least the Pinkan lads or the EDP lads or the athletic, until Paddy or Michael or someone tells us, no, there is actually a genuine option here.
00:39:27
Speaker
What's the point in getting cross about it? Because there's no one else. If they walk away, we're even worse. So they've shown that if we really needed to, a couple of million quickly to balance the books, they'd do it. I'd rather have that than uncertainty, personally. What about you, Edie?
00:39:47
Speaker
I think it's really interesting how Dia keeps getting singled out when she's... I know, right? Well, it feels a little bit like, you know, like what makes that person stand out? It's weird though, unfortunately. Yeah. And I think again, it comes back to this sort of identity thing where I think there are certain people that just want us to just be like basically
00:40:13
Speaker
kind of FIFA game where everyone has identical names and thumbs for heads and everything's very manly and driven and you know it borders on Alan Partridge this vision. Can I just say though Edie that the latest FIFA 22 has the striped nets and I was very impressed by it. Oh carry on. Wow that's like a genuine achievement that. Yeah hold that in your heart.
00:40:43
Speaker
But yeah, so it's the whole thing of like deal you out. They want some random mobile phone giant startup owner to turn up and like make it rain on the pitch, get three cheers, start a massive Mexican wave and then run off with all the laptops. I don't think so. But it's that thing of like little wah-wah baby poos down on legs, blames granny thing. And it's not a good look.
00:41:11
Speaker
Absolutely not. And I think it's anyone who criticizes Delia of all people and singles her out. They clearly have no idea of history or experience or anything. It's just
00:41:28
Speaker
It's just hysteria and it's weird and dumb. Now this sounds really culture wars, but there are certain phrases and certain hashtags and certain flags in people's Twitter handles. There's a little kind of iconography of people who you think, once you see that,
00:41:46
Speaker
you then read the rest of the statement or the rest of what they say through a slightly different lens and you think, yeah, but you said that. For me, one of those triggers is deal you out. So if you say deal you out, if that phrase is used in any way,
00:42:01
Speaker
then, you know, I'm not going as far as saying we can't be friends. But I'm saying that any other opinion on football is therefore, I'm not going to take too seriously, because you've got a problem with a lady who's done her best. And, you know, you know, is not is not in control of she's
Closing Remarks and Upcoming Games
00:42:19
Speaker
not the wheel. And it's not just her. It should be dealing with Michael, if you're going to do that, or Michael and Delia probably more specifically. And Matthew, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, we're talking about
00:42:31
Speaker
2030 lads with banners at the weekend, the River Island revolutionaries. I just don't think that this is a widespread view across the fan base and they're getting way outsized attention for it with a 39.99 printed banner. So I think to some extent it's worth us
00:42:58
Speaker
Noting for the record that overwhelmingly, I think Delia and Michael are held in very high esteem for what they've done for the club and for the model that we've built and that there's widespread support for that model. One of the questions that we got asked on Twitter, same question, but it was phrased, what's your opinion on a big money investor? Should one be found? Should one be found is doing an incredible amount of work there. If you've got money problems and you think the solution here is I should win the lottery, you don't have a solution.
00:43:28
Speaker
you know, we don't have someone who wants to give us a tremendous amount of money. And if we did have somebody like that come along, it is very probable that they would come with incredible baggage of either running us into the ground as the likes of Derby are found, or taking us to an incredibly dark and unpleasant place like Newcastle United have found. And, you know, if I had the choice of staying up
00:43:51
Speaker
this season with being owned by somebody who murders journalists in consulates versus getting relegated to the championship with Dina as our owner. It's an absolute no-brainer for me because football isn't just about where we sit in the league. It's who we are as a club and a group of fans. It is gutting that the model that we've got is not delivering the goods we want.
00:44:13
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that there's an easy solution or a solution that we want to take if it came along. It's also delivering nearly the good we want and it's delivered the good last few years and you know, not to go over old ground, literally just from this podcast, but we need a few things to go right. And there's nothing to say a few things won't go right in the coming games.
00:44:34
Speaker
And if we can be more fortunate with the COVID situation affecting our specific squad, especially the particular players that the injuries and COVID has affected them, we've just got to have our fingers crossed that there is maybe a little bit of a sting of the tail of this transfer window. Maybe someone does go out, maybe Todd does leave, and that gives us the money, the wages to sign someone until the end of the season to bang in some goals or sign someone to add a bit of creativity or add a bit of steel into midfield.
00:45:04
Speaker
We just have to try and be as positive as we can whilst I think, whilst from a points point of view, it is still logistically very, very possible. I can't see it at all at the moment, just purely cannot, haven't seen enough on the pitch to suggest that being four points is as good as it's going to get and we're never going to close that gap, it's only going to get bigger.
00:45:26
Speaker
It is still possible. So with that in mind... It is. Can I just, sorry, I know you're about to wrap up Tom, but I just wanted to make one more point and I think Matthew saying that there's an overwhelming support for the model and there's overwhelming respect. I would agree that there's overwhelming respect for
00:45:41
Speaker
for Delia and for Michael and for for what they've built and and the fact that this has taken the club to um you know two championship titles to a playoff win at Wembley you know all of those things I think that is undeniable and and the majority of the fan base will be forever grateful for that. I don't include myself as part of this you know kind of group of fans but I think there are now increasingly a group of fans who have said do you know what
00:46:06
Speaker
it's been brilliant, it's been a real roller coaster, I feel a bit sick now and I want to get off the roller coaster and the only way that they can see to get off that roller coaster is investment and so I think they are increasingly coming round to you know kind of the view that actually that's what we need to do and I don't necessarily think it's the right answer and there are so many examples where it's failed and probably only one or two really good examples of where it's gone particularly well but I think
00:46:34
Speaker
we might just be underestimating that there is a groundswell or they're starting to be a groundswell of opinion to say, do you know what, time to get off the roller coaster.
00:46:43
Speaker
And if they don't start their argument with dealer out, and if they don't include that hashtag, then I'll listen to an absenceful conversation about it. As I say, when there's a viable option, the conversation has to be had, and I think it will do, when it is possible. But look, we've got two huge games coming up, and Everton at the weekend is an opportunity at home. And let's hope that, you know, that there is some positivity and some positive atmosphere going into that game.
00:47:07
Speaker
In and around the club I will be trying to announce something, release something, suggest something in the coming couple of days to try and get a bit of positivity going before the game. And then the following Friday it is huge, that Watford game. Imagine if we even got a draw at Vickery's Row, kept them in our sights, kept them within arm's length. That would be fantastic after, you know, obviously losing at Carrow Road to them early in the season.
00:47:31
Speaker
Enjoy the game on Saturday, we'll be back with you very soon to see how we're getting through this busy period of fixtures and hopefully we'll have some goals, or let's have it right, a goal to celebrate. Mind how you go.