Canary Wundaboy

I have that pattern on my face mask, love it.

No thanks.

I like Jack but Chris does come out with some utter nonsense on a regular basis, which he then doubles down on through being fairly obnoxious. I haven’t listened to the ACN podcast, will give that a shot as I don’t think the Scrimmage is on much over the break.

What I mean is over the last 12 months we've had multiple long injury layoffs affecting players who don't have the best injury records in the first place. Players like Hanley, Klose, Byram and Drmic have been out for long periods, these are all players we acquired who had injuries before we bought them. It does allow us to pick up these players relatively cheaply, but last season injuries really affected our chances of staying up.

Not good enough and wouldn't be surprised if we're trying to offload him quietly.

Urm, we haven’t actually sold anyone yet, so have we failed catastrophically at having a fire sale already?!

*Sigh* So Jamal will be first choice if he stays after all, despite some people on here putting him behind Byram in the pecking order. He was cheap at least, but this whole approach of buying cheap players with injury histories does seem to have bitten us repeatedly in the past 12 months.

Villa may have been lucky to stay up, but the messages from the management and ownership were always that relegation would be a disaster for them and it was key to avoid it at all costs, was that a more effective motivator than constantly playing down their chances, calling us underdogs and expecting to be relegated from day 1?

McNally was responsible for the hiring and firing but ultimately would not have done so without the approval of the owners. I did not attempt to say that every decision the owners have ever made has been bad, merely that we have a track record of leaving under-performing manager sin place for too long compared to most other teams, and that Delia has been on record multiple times in the past praising how "nice" our managers are and that she takes to them personally, which you don't hear from owners of other football clubs that often. Hell, she was talking about Alex Neil being our manager for a decade straight after our Wembley win, while I was ecstatic about the result at the time all decisions about the manager should be purely results-driven and I sometimes think the owners lose sight of that.

Fair point, got my order mixed up. Edited and credit given.

So do we credit Delia and MWJ for letting McNally sack him after it was proven he was way out of his depth, or criticise them for giving him the job in the first place, not sacking him when we were relegated, and then appointing him permanently for just a single game which resulted in a 7-1 defeat? What about sacking Chris Hughton far too late only to promote "nice guy" Neil Adams from within rather than trying to get in an outside candidate with more experience to try and keep us up?

How about appointing Gunn permanently after taking us down to League One despite a relatively large (for Norwich) fan backlash?

Delia already gets too close to our managers and that leads to issues when hard decisions need to be made.

Against Ipswich? That would really test the goodwill of the fans. We haven’t lost to them in a decade and at the moment they’re in their weakest position during that decade and us supposedly with a Championship-dominating team. I appreciate that the cup is the cup but losing to Ipswich just isn’t the Norwich Way!

Look on the bright side, if we did draw them it’s a free pass to the next round as there’s absolutely no way the management will want to be losing that. Cup or not, losing to them down the round would not be easily forgiven.