Norwich City started off their German tour with a thrilling second half comeback against Paderborn, having come from 2-0 down with goals from Dennis Srbeny and Teemu Pukki (2) in the second half making the headlines. However, after the game there was only one topic of conversation that everyone wanted to know about.
It seems that we have been talking about Nelson Oliveira forever, well, to quantify that, since the start of last summer at least, since the opening day of last season at Craven Cottage and we’re still talking about him now.
Daniel Farke has now admitted that he has made a conscious decision to leave Nelson at home for the trip to Germany, as he wants the squad to bond together tightly.
That angry, petulant display of temper after coming on and scoring a very late equaliser at Fulham, showed that things weren’t right in the relationship between player and Head Coach.
You will recall that he was dropped for the League Cup game with Swindon after that Fulham “celebration” and he then apologised to the squad and the coaching staff for his behaviour. I got the feeling after that, that there was an uneasy truce between Oliveira and Daniel Farke but that things could spill over again at any moment. The player was dropped in March again after what was described as “not working hard enough in training” and his lack of goals just underlined what looked like an unhappy situation for both the club and player.
No player, or manager/coach for that matter, is bigger than the club and anyone who’s ever played team sports will tell you that having a tightly knit group of team mates will get you quite a long way on spirit alone. We saw it at Norwich under Paul Lambert and then we saw that slowly fall apart under Chris Hughton as big name players came in, no doubt on varying sizes of salaries. It was a necessary thing to do to try to progress BUT it didn’t work out.
It’s starting to look like the City squad are bonding together again, at least publically and as I say, that will take you some distance on it’s own.
After seeing his side put on an exciting second half comeback against Paderborn on Sunday, Farke spoke to the Norfolk media. He’d made changes at half time and Louis Thompson was again very good, helping to make the difference.
Inevitably though, he was asked about Nelson’s absence.
You can read everything that Farke told the EDP’s Paddy Davitt here.
The key comments from that interview though were “Nelson is part of our group and we just decided not to have him with us. We want to build a togetherness in this group and bring them tightly together.”
That is a damning statement on the current state of things regarding Nelson Oliveira and his future at Norwich looks bleak, to say the least.
It reads as though his presence could in some way harm the team bonding process and integration of the new players.
Wow.
Nelson has made it pretty obvious he wants out and that would seem to be the end game for the fiery Portuguese now. I expect his agent is touting his man all over Europe, looking for a team who want a Portuguese international striker. He’s probably not talking too much about his client’s temperament.
Stuart Webber and Steve Stone will be glad to shift his wages, I expect and Daniel Farke will be glad to get some harmony back in his squad.
The win over Paderborn showed an excellent second half display and I managed to watch a bit of the first half on an internet stream. In between all the blocky glitching, I saw us barely get out of our half in the first 20 minutes and eventually gave up watching as it was on my phone and at times I couldn’t even see the ball.
Still, the result was good and I’ve since seen Teemu Pukki’s goals and they were very good individual efforts. We might just have a player on our hands there.
https://twitter.com/andypbowles/status/1018467079354245121?s=21
https://twitter.com/andypbowles/status/1018468868350767104?s=21
https://twitter.com/andypbowles/status/1018469715902070784?s=21
Next up are games against Union Berlin and Wolfsburg, which will both be a step up in class, so we’ll see how they pan out.
In other news, Alex Tettey has chicken pox, which is very nasty for an adult and could mean he’s not in contention for the start of the season in three weeks time.
Also, rather disappointingly, while the Paderborn game was taking place, some of the players’ rooms were broken into and money stolen.
Oh…. #ncfc pic.twitter.com/0tOzuBf3FC
— Mark 🔰 (@OldSchoolMarky) July 15, 2018
Apparently an investigation involving the Police is underway.
Not nice.
OTBC