It’s not been a great weekend to be a Norwich City fan, has it?
The defeat at the hands of Swansea City on Friday night set up the potential of a weekend of wailing and gnashing of teeth for those of a yellow & green persuasion that didn’t disappoint due to Brentford doing what they do.
I tried to keep off the Sky Sports app on Saturday afternoon but couldn’t help take an early peek. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Watford could only draw at Coventry and to my delight, Middlesbrough had taken an early lead at home to Brentford. The way that Boro played against us last weekend meant that they could just sit back and see the game out, couldn’t they?
No, as it turned out. They were trounced 4-1 by Thomas Frank’s relentless winning machine of a football team. The Canaries looked like that in the first half of the season and they pulled out a seven point lead at the the top of the table, a lead that has basically disappeared in the last seven days.
The safety net has gone. It is time to get back to winning ways or else and, dare I say, it needs to happen now because Brentford and Swansea are not going to let up now, they sense blood in the water. Norwich are having a wobble.
The loss of Emi Buendia, to yet another red card, for the last two games has shown up a serious lack of invention in the final third of the field. The statistic that is being bandied about is that Norwich have failed to win 15 of the 16 games that Buendia has been unavailable for in the last two and a half years. That’s either due to injury, suspension or not being focussed. Norwich clearly aren’t a one man team but that stat makes it look like we are, doesn’t it?
The game at Swansea was always going to be a difficult challenge. The fact they have only conceded 15 goals all season marked the Swans’ defence, with Ryan Bennett at the heart of it, a tough nut to crack. We were going to need Buendia and then he got that second yellow against Boro.
His replacement was Przemyslaw Placheta, who was poor at Millwall and he was poor again against Swansea. He just doesn’t seem to affect the game enough. I know wingers can be in and out and unlike Buendia or Todd Cantwell, he is that most traditional of wingers, fleet of foot and able to cross a decent ball but we just don’t get the best out of him, do we?
Speaking of Cantwell, he had a couple of bright moments on Friday night. When he runs at a defence, he’s at his best and most dangerous but those moments came to nothing and despite his running and effort, he couldn’t make anything else happen. Naturally he got hammered on social media but I didn’t think he was that bad.
The lack of an effective, regular number 10 has been an issue all season, with Kieran Dowell the pretender to the throne having barely got his season up and running due to various injury issues. Mario Vrancic, Lukas Rupp, Kenny McLean and the injured Marco Stiepermann have all played there but none have been able to hold things together consistently and to supply Teemu Pukki with the sort of balls that Stiepermann did in 2019/20.
Pukki looks a yard off the pace at the moment and the miss wide of the post in the first half, coupled with that wild slash when played in by Hernandez in the second, summed his night up.
Adam Idah’s introduction didn’t produce the goal to get us back in the game but he did do enough in his 30 minute cameo to offer some promise of a genuinely effective option, once he returns to full fitness. His mix of physicality and pace offer something different to Pukki.
You can point out where this game was lost, in two individual errors from Tim Krul and Kenny McLean but for Krul, I can’t criticise him too much – It’s his first major rick of the season. When a keeper makes a mistake, it usually costs a goal so the spotlight is always brighter but Krul has been superb for the last two years or so.
As for Kenny’s poor control that led to the second, well, that was just poor.
The big positive for me is the partnership between Ben Gibson and Grant Hanley. It’s the sort of partnership that Norwich haven’t had the likes of for the last decade. Gibson has been superb and his passing (his stats are ridiculous) and starting of attacks from the back is excellent. The run of games, coupled with keeping fit and Gibson’s arrival, have shown us what Hanley is really all about and it’s taken the pressure off Krul compared to last season.
The return of Buendia for the visit of Stoke next weekend is timely because right now, Norwich need their talisman.
OTBC