As you may or may not know, Vital Norwich has a forum, which you can check out here.
As you’d expect from a football forum, there are differing opinions and at the moment, there’s a question over whether or not you, as a fan, still support the board and where the new style of running the first team is going?
This question was prompted by a couple of forum members with different opinions on the owners of the club. One of the best things about the Vital Norwich forum is that things never ever get nasty and that’s something that we are all proud of. There are no personal insults or attacks, just healthy reasoned debate. The opposite of Twitter, if you will.
Canary Kevin promptly started a thread with a poll to see who thinks what and I thought I’d share where I am at in the grand scheme of things, after all, I am the editor.
“I’ll start off by saying that Delia and Michael saved the club from a financial nightmare back in the day and I’m grateful for that. They’ve presided over good times and bad times and they’ve made good decisions and bad decisions.
As owners, they decide who to employ to run things. They are not “football people” as such, so have to rely on others to make the football decisions but they are ultimately responsible. The best decision they have made during their tenure, so far, was the appointment of David McNally as Chief Exec. He made some great decisions and also some poor ones, but that’s football. This is not an exact science after all.
In terms of the here and now, I don’t think Delia and Michael are best placed to take us, as a club, forwards. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always be grateful for what they’ve done for the club, however, lots of money is required to be successful in the modern age so I think a change of ownership would be best.
As far as the decisions regarding football, I’m fully behind Webber and Farke. The Sporting Director model has been hugely successful in other football leagues around the world and it makes perfect sense to me. It’s a different way of doing things to the traditional English manager model and I think it can work here.
The idea of producing young players from our own academy is a sound one but one that will not come to fruition overnight. Having said that, we arguably have Lewis, Matthews, Cantwell and Godfrey ready for next season’s Championship now.
Those four players could have a huge impact on our squad and three of them have barely played for us yet, so they could be a big and positive surprise to a lot of our fans.
The board will decide how much money there is to spend on further additions this summer and I’m not expecting that to be too much, relatively speaking. So the question is, do I trust Stuart Webber to spend it wisely and my answer would be “Yes.”
He and Steve Stone are hugely impressive chaps to speak and listen to and they impressed me when I met them at a fan forum last summer. Daniel Farke, it should be remembered, doesn’t decide what players are bought but he liaises closely with Webber about the type of players he needs for his squad. No doubt he has offered certain names up, such as Trybull, Stiepermann and Leitner and those three didn’t turn out too badly. Not all the signings we’ve made have come off.
Marley Watkins was a dud and Marcel Franke struggled, he may yet come good, I suppose. Decisions made by previous recruitment teams, like RvW, Fer, Naismith and Elmander cost us big time, again underlining that signing players is, to use the phrase again, not an exact science.
In terms of Farke himself, his job is to coach and last season it didn’t quite click. The play was very often too slow to build up but the fact that we had such a large number of shots at goal in the end of season stats tables makes me think that some of the issues were down to individuals. Things do need to improve this coming season and scoring goals is the main “topic” as Farke might say, and it’s his job to sort it out.
So, after all that, I am still supportive of the Stone, Webber and Farke triumvirate. They all know though that a promotion tilt is required this season or the natives will really be getting restless.”
Get yourself over to the forum and get on the “Yes or No?” thread and put your opinion down because this is a good one.
You can go straight to the forum thread here.
OTBC