Petriix

This is my fear. I doubt we'd be successful in the Championship playing 4-4-2, but look forward to being proved spectacularly wrong. Dowell could play tip of the diamond pretty well but I'd prefer him as the attacking 10 in a 4-2-3-1. I think he works hard enough for that. We need creativity, otherwise we've got nothing going for us.

It always amazes me how so few football fans notice the fundamentals like this. Dowell was excellent when we had the ball, but poor when out of possession. However, most if this was tactical ineptitude in how the team was setup rather than individual culpability by Dowell himself as I'll explain... Our wide attacking midfielders were both too high and left us exposed down both flanks. We had the central DMs covering the wide areas but this was flawed. For both Newcastle's first-half goals they attacked down the right (our left) drawing the central midfielders to that side, leaving a gaping hole on the other flank from where we ultimately conceded. Sadly this is reminiscent of the flaws of the 4-2-3-1 Farke initially employed in the first part of his tenure. These issues were fixed last season by bringing the wide AMs deeper and keeping the DMs more central. Unfortunately Dean Smith has taken us back to square one with the imbalance in this system. Hopefully he'll learn quickly next season and fix this flaw without abandoning what is fairly obviously our best system.

I've not seen any improvement over what Farke offered. Sacking him was an extremely arrogant move by Webber - doubling down on his awful transfer business suggesting that a different manager would be able to get more out of the same group of players. We can all see the results.

While I strongly believe that we'd be in a far better position if Webber had left in the summer (before the disastrous transfer window) and we still had Farke, I dread to think of the depths we would fall to with Dean Smith under and Neil Adams as DoF. Continuity is important so a smooth transition is going to be far better than a sudden change. I totally agree with the sentiment of not being defined by your job and not being a slave to 'giving 100%' to your work. Life is far bigger than that and I respect anyone who chooses to challenge themselves. Although I do think climbing Everest is an absurd risk on a personal level! Sometimes I think people just wish for change without really considering the implications (see Brexit). Often sticking with the imperfect status quo is the better choice - as long as it's in a progressive state of continuing improvement.

As one of the 'usual suspects', I couldn't disagree more. We'd evolved the system from 2019-20 and it gave us our best season in the club's history. It was madness to change it so radically at the start of this season and no coincidence that we're playing better after reverting to it. Farke was absolutely at fault for abandoning it. It's unfortunate that he returned to it too late and even more unfortunate that Dean Smith has worked through just about every other formation possible before arriving back at the original plan. No one can claim to be factually correct in their 'what if' scenarios, but we can be disappointed with where we've ended up. While you can maintain that it wouldn't have worked, much of the evidence points to 4-2-3-1 being our best formation with this current group - especially without Gilmour and especially against the lesser teams in the league.

I may have been a little vociferous about this in the past. We totally destroyed our season by ripping up the system and trying to play a 4-3-3. People kept telling me that a) our previous system was too open for the Premier League - despite the way we'd adapted it to be more balanced; and b) our current players didn't have the ability to play this system. I'll maintain until I'm blue in the face that we'd have comfortably survived if we'd just had the belief to stick with our philosophy (and never tried to accommodate Gilmour). Brentford did exactly that.

This thread aged well...

Personally I can't stand any commentary. My most enjoyable football on TV has been the occasional stream where there's just the ambient sound. Muting doesn't work because you need to be able to hear the whistle but, if I could, I'd choose to never have any commentary at all. However, while commentary is a thing, I'm happy for it to be more representative of society. It's tended to be middle aged white men historically, which are amongst the people whose voices I'd least like to hear. Any divergence from that monoculture is a good thing.

As I understand it, the total wage budget in the accounts includes all the bonuses paid. I believe we structure our player and management staff wages such that basic salaries are low but bonuses are high. So, on promotion, our overall wages look pretty high, but the exposure to risk is low because the extra outlay is contingent on the guaranteed additional income from the following season. None of this is broken down separately in the accounts. Indeed, there is only one figure for 'wages' of around £54M from 2020-21. That includes all 332 employees of the club. If we assume that £45M relates to player remuneration and that the bulk of that is shared between the 20 first team regulars, an average of £2M each would be £38.4K per week. But it's pretty difficult to know what proportion of that would be bonuses. It wouldn't surprise me at all if our best paid players in the Championship were on £40k per week basic salary. We obviously have no idea who is included in that £30k average, or indeed how accurate it is. Remember too that this was a squad only just relegated and therefore covered by parachute payments. We don't know the details of contracts, but it's likely that relegation reductions are linked to turnover. You can also imagine that our 2019-20 wages would have also had significant bonuses due on avoiding relegation - which obviously weren't payable. So, while the difference between the two seasons appears lower than expected, it could easily be explained by the contrasting success on the pitch.

It's more about his work off the ball. I've seen a clip of him racing back to clear the ball off the line for Scotland. He would *never* do something like that for us.

I'm not convinced, or I'm fairly certain that Gilmour wasn't anywhere near the level the recruitment team imagined. Certainly not ready to build a Premier League team around. I don't think having a Skipp or two would have solved the issue. We need the whole midfield to work as a unit, closing down space, cutting off passing angles, tracking runs - all things Gilmour doesn't do well or consistently enough. Passing, vision, creativity are only half of the job. I've been trying to reconcile the disparity between his performances for Scotland and what he's shown for us. All I can conclude is that he simply isn't putting in the same work rate and passion; he just doesn't care enough about Norwich City. That extra effort can help to mitigate the defensive deficiencies and I think that's what may have made the difference. Ultimately we needed evolution not revolution. Gilmour represented a significant departure from our previous system: at best a massive gamble. Too much of a roll of the dice when we needed continuity and to build on what we already had.

This is it though, all of the fouls we committed involved contact with legs; often very minor contact. The 'fouls' that weren't given were all contact with the upper body or 'ball to hand' etc. All pretty marginal and nothing significant. It's really pointless getting frustrated with the subjective calls. I thought we mostly committed intelligent fouls in safer areas anyway.

If we could replace her with someone young and attractive, preferably with loads of money, that would be ideal. So I guess 'Leicester model' is probably the best fit from the choices available.

I totally disagree. I thought he was excellent throughout. We made a number of very soft fouls which were almost all deservedly penalised. Burnley were physical but largely stayed on the legal side of the grey area. The fans got on his back but he stayed professional. His call on the free kick just outside the box was bang on.

Weird how we've finally won a game by reverting to Farke's favoured formation and actually trying to play football. Makes you wonder why we didn't just do this from the start of the season.

Honestly, I wonder why people who clearly have such a limited understanding of the game bother commenting. Dowell linked the play incredibly well today. His work off the ball was excellent and he created loads of space for our other attacking players to exploit.

I stand by my comment. I firmly believe that we destroyed our chances by trying to build our team around him and switching to the 4-3-3. I don't know how you can claim I'm exaggerating when it's an entirely hypothetical scenario Our problems have always been in midfield. I've never once seen Gilmour put in the level of desire and commitment on display today; at least not for us. Remind me again of the proportion of our wins in which he has featured?

No coincidence. Back to 4-2-3-1, no Gilmour, we can suddenly play football again. If only we'd never loaned him in and played this way from day 1. What a different season we'd have had.

The irony being that we were clearly a better team than Brentford last season. But they have retained far greater continuity from last season while we (inexplicably) rolled the dice and came off far worse.

I think the point is that far too many decisions were made, leaving us far too vulnerable to those decisions turning out to be mistakes. Ok, selling Buendia is the conspicuous one. But maybe that wouldn't have been such an issue if we'd given Vrancic another year, given Cantwell a massive pay rise and built the team around him, kept the same system that we'd refined over 4 years etc. Perhaps giving Farke a 4 year contract then sacking him weeks later was a bit too much of a financial gamble; compounded by clearly not having a coherent strategy for his replacement. Or breaking the transfer record three times without actually improving the first team. Each of these things in isolation was maybe survivable. But, in combination, they add up to a catastrophic failure from which short term recovery is unlikely. I keep saying it: this incarnation of Norwich City is unrecognisable from Farke's Championship winners.

When you compare what we'll be starting our 2022-23 Championship campaign with in comparison to last season, it's shocking how far backwards we've gone. Our goals came from Pukki and Buendia primarily, but there were significant contributions from Cantwell and Vrancic too. I have zero faith that Rashica, Sargent, PLM and (if he ever plays for us again) Tzolis could come close to matching the level we found in 2020-21. We just don't have any creativity whatsoever. We'll still have that massive CDM hole to fill. At least Gilmour and Normann will be gone. I find it hard to imagine a worse central midfield pairing. Perhaps if Normann wasn't carrying an injury and was capable of maintaining the required intensity for 90 minutes, or if Gilmour actually cared enough to bother tracking his man... Things might have been different. I'm struggling to imagine how we could possibly be competitive in the near future.

How can a squad go from its best ever season to not good enough in such a short space of time?

There's no doubt. Our squad last season was vastly superior to what we have now. Skipp, Buendia, Vrancic were a different level to Gilmour, PLM and Rashica. We've spent the biggest budget in the club's history to go backwards. Smith is inferior to Farke in every way.

Farke gave us the two best seasons in the club's history. What has Smith given us? Abject failure. No coherent plan. The same tactical mistakes over and over again. He's a fraud.

Not me. I was always happy playing the right way, even if results weren't going for us. I can't stand the 'brand of football' we're seeing under Dean Smith.