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Hardhouse44

Lowest ebb. Pride and passion.

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On Saturday 8th of August 2009 I reached the lowest ebb of my 30 plus years of supporting Norwich City FC. I doubt I was alone.What I saw that day was a passionless, gutless, clueless performance from a group of players that looked like a pub team that had been on a stag do the night before. I have never felt lower as a city fan. I can take defeat, I''m a Norwich fan you have to, but that was shameful. My team, Norwich, the pride of east Anglia, the club I watched beat Bayern Munich, that I saw play such dazzling football in the inaugural Premiership season that I saw win the 85 league cup, reduced to that. To being humiliated in the 3rd tier of English football.Did I lose some pride in my team that day? I think I did. Should have? probably not, your team is your team but something in me that felt like I had been kick in the guts by the one thing I really love most outside my family.Watching that game on that day in August was a surreal event. It was almost like I wasn''t there, like I was watching from behind a thick pane of glass (and no I wasn''t in an executive box). I felt detached from my club. I wasn''t able to verbalise my displeasure, my anger, my disappointment. I had watch my club slowly deteriorate over the years, watched as the we signed duff player after cheap duff player, as we appoint managers with levels of ineptitude, and arrogance beyond belief. I even watch a once great hero of our club wrongfully given a job way above him just to keep things cheap.  But I never felt anything a badly as I did that day. Did I throw my season ticket away. NoWhat is the point of all this. I’m getting there now. I love the pride and passion of football and I lost it badly that day. Now I know everything is relative and I am well aware that we are a 1st div team now and not setting the premiership alight like in day gone by. I except that. However pride and passion is not relative it''s either in there or it isn''t. Slowly it has built back up in me. Why? because we are near the top of the league and winning games? Yes of course that is a big part. Fickle I hear you cry. Maybe. But just as much because I see the passion in our team again in our club again, and be that in the Premiership or the conference that feeling you get when you see players playing for you, for us for the club. That feeling when you see player celebrating as one with each other when the team scores rather that just walking back to the centre spot because they''re not that bothered. (You know what I mean) That feeling is the best. It''s not about just winning it about belonging to something worth belonging to.As I watched on the illegal satellite feed on Saturday I had a few tears in my eyes. Tears of joy at winning for sure but also a tear or two because I felt that there and then I got my club back. I saw there on Saturday everything I have said about what football is to me. I saw passion and pride and I saw my players, our player playing for us.Mr Lambert I salute you. Thank you for giving me my club back. Sorry for the long windedness of all this but I felt like getting it of my chest.OTBC

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[quote user="Hardhouse44"]On Saturday 8th of August 2009 I reached the lowest ebb of my 30 plus years of supporting Norwich City FC. I doubt I was alone.

What I saw that day was a passionless, gutless, clueless performance from a group of players that looked like a pub team that had been on a stag do the night before. I have never felt lower as a city fan. I can take defeat, I''m a Norwich fan you have to, but that was shameful. My team, Norwich, the pride of east Anglia, the club I watched beat Bayern Munich, that I saw play such dazzling football in the inaugural Premiership season that I saw win the 85 league cup, reduced to that. To being humiliated in the 3rd tier of English football.

Did I lose some pride in my team that day? I think I did. Should have? probably not, your team is your team but something in me that felt like I had been kick in the guts by the one thing I really love most outside my family.

Watching that game on that day in August was a surreal event. It was almost like I wasn''t there, like I was watching from behind a thick pane of glass (and no I wasn''t in an executive box). I felt detached from my club. I wasn''t able to verbalise my displeasure, my anger, my disappointment.

I had watch my club slowly deteriorate over the years, watched as the we signed duff player after cheap duff player, as we appoint managers with levels of ineptitude, and arrogance beyond belief. I even watch a once great hero of our club wrongfully given a job way above him just to keep things cheap.  But I never felt anything a badly as I did that day.

Did I throw my season ticket away. No

What is the point of all this. I’m getting there now. I love the pride and passion of football and I lost it badly that day. Now I know everything is relative and I am well aware that we are a 1st div team now and not setting the premiership alight like in day gone by. I except that. However pride and passion is not relative it''s either in there or it isn''t. Slowly it has built back up in me. Why? because we are near the top of the league and winning games? Yes of course that is a big part. Fickle I hear you cry. Maybe. But just as much because I see the passion in our team again in our club again, and be that in the Premiership or the conference that feeling you get when you see players playing for you, for us for the club. That feeling when you see player celebrating as one with each other when the team scores rather that just walking back to the centre spot because they''re not that bothered. (You know what I mean) That feeling is the best. It''s not about just winning it about belonging to something worth belonging to.

As I watched on the illegal satellite feed on Saturday I had a few tears in my eyes. Tears of joy at winning for sure but also a tear or two because I felt that there and then I got my club back. I saw there on Saturday everything I have said about what football is to me. I saw passion and pride and I saw my players, our player playing for us.

Mr Lambert I salute you. Thank you for giving me my club back.

Sorry for the long windedness of all this but I felt like getting it of my chest.

OTBC

[/quote]

Fantastic and totally agree [Y]

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Absolutely fantastic post, and almost exactly sums up how I felt / feel about it all.

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Good post [:)].You have to hope that all this could lead to something great, eventually. The club feels more united, the fans seem content, even with the board. No hints at protests or anything despite our recently revealed financial situation. The players, even those not having a good game, at least continue to strive at a 100% work rate.I honestly believe Lambert has what it takes to make us very competitive at the top end of the championship...but whether we like it or not we will need the relative finances to do so.

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I think we all hit the depths of despair last season, and I can''t remember a time in my NC supporting history where I have felt so low and so unpassionate about supporting my club.

It was like watching a nightmare unfold, loan after loan came into the club, clueless manager after clueless manager, I and a vast amount of supporters were seeing players don our colours, but playing as though they hadn''t a care in the world.

I admit to getting to the stage last season where I didn''t enjoy my time at CR.  We also boycotted games, which I have only even done once before during the Chase era.

Now we go to matches full of hope, full of expectation, knowing we have a ''team'' who will play for their shirts, and where the desire to win shows clearly, even when a goal down, the heads no longer drop and they push on for the win or a draw.  I now smile when watching, or listening to the lads playing, knowing they give 150% for the manager, the club and importantly for the fans.

And it''s nice to see a manager who actually knows what he''s doing, and we have grown to trust his judgement in players and tactics. 

It was a heartbreaking day when we were relegated, but I think it needed to happen to wake a few people up in the boardroom.  Yes we are in a league which we haven''t graced for 50 years, but we are rising from the ashes, and slowly and surely the good feel factor is coming back to FCR, and about bloody time too.

 

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Really superb OP, and one we can all relate to, I think. There aren''t many things in life which can move an entire community; but football can, and that makes Lambert and McNally - for now at least - heroes. Because they''ve turned our whole club around, and given us our pride back. Something which looked a million years away at Charlton, or on August 8, or as the club drifted helplessly during those horrible last two seasons in the Championship. Amongst the players, who could the fans identify with? Hardly anyone in truth. Even the board had essentially given up, as they openly admitted: they had no vision, no plan, no hope (other than blind faith, that is).Now look at us. I think history will record that the decline in our fortunes began with one six-goal humiliation, and ended with another. Sandwiched in between was all sorts of rubbish, caused above all by the pathetic, self-defeating ethos of this club. Whisper it, but five months before Fulham, Brian Woolnough spotted it and commented on it. This made him Public Enemy Number 1 - but was he wrong? The team and manager were cowards that day at Chelsea, as they were at Fulham, and at Charlton, and on opening day against Colchester. Something was rotten at the heart of this club: that something was, literally, heart, pride and desire to be the absolute best we could be, regardless of finance, or the tired old excuses Delia or Doncaster would forever trot out. All of which left many of us disillusioned, almost disconnected on some level. We still loved the club, but wanted so much better for it than those at the helm appeared to: something I concluded not through their words, but their deeds and above all, their attitudes. It was the attitude of losers, and must never, ever happen again.But then came Charlton, and at length, Colchester. If this didn''t wake people up, nothing ever would - and look at the difference real vision, drive and energy can give a football club. Look at the difference a genuinely positive approach instead of excuses and pointing out how unfair modern football is can make. Saturday showed how far we''ve come, and hinted at how much more is possible if we keep it up - and in the case of all of us now, I think it''s safe to say that we''ve got our Norwich mojos back.

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I think I speak for every Norwich fan in the world and say that I would like to renew my vows to NCFC!!

I used to have a NCFC t-shirt that had the 10 commandments according to Norwich City FC. Did anyone else have one and remember what they were?

I know one of them was... Thou must not get married on a match day.

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Couldn''t have put it better. Only thing I would add is thanks to McNally for having balls unlike the gutless idiots he replaced. Knowing someone inside the club I would hear all the moans and groans about Worthy, Grant, Rodent and in particular Gunny.

Having supported the club since the 60''s I know like many others that when its good you need to store the memories away ready for the bad times as the great wheel of football fortunes keeps turning. I remember saying that to one of my sons after they had suffered years of disappointment after relegation in the early 90''s. Libra had just backheeled the ball down the line for Rivers to beat his man (the one and only time?) and cross for WLY to blast the ball past the Gold Scum keeper in a 2-0 win.

In more recent times "Top of the League at Portman Road" came to mind as we watched the inept display at the Valley last May. The inevitable stick we still get from those morons 40 miles south of here will at some point be rammed back down their throats as that wheel turns. If we can keep Lambert and his backroom staff at Colney, the front three fit on the pitch, and McNally in the Boardroom, then we might just be in a position in a few months time to be looking forward to being back where we belong and much brighter times ahead with more memories to store away.

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[quote user="Hard Cell"]Couldn''t have put it better. Only thing I would add is thanks to McNally for having balls unlike the gutless idiots he replaced. Knowing someone inside the club I would hear all the moans and groans about Worthy, Grant, Rodent and in particular Gunny.

Having supported the club since the 60''s I know like many others that when its good you need to store the memories away ready for the bad times as the great wheel of football fortunes keeps turning. I remember saying that to one of my sons after they had suffered years of disappointment after relegation in the early 90''s. Libra had just backheeled the ball down the line for Rivers to beat his man (the one and only time?) and cross for WLY to blast the ball past the Gold Scum keeper in a 2-0 win.

In more recent times "Top of the League at Portman Road" came to mind as we watched the inept display at the Valley last May. The inevitable stick we still get from those morons 40 miles south of here will at some point be rammed back down their throats as that wheel turns. If we can keep Lambert and his backroom staff at Colney, the front three fit on the pitch, and McNally in the Boardroom, then we might just be in a position in a few months time to be looking forward to being back where we belong and much brighter times ahead with more memories to store away.[/quote]You''ve gone and done it now, there will be the usual suspects in the thread soon defending Mr Gunn!!

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Doncaster was the rotten heart of this club. It was always, if''s and buts. The club mission statement went from being a regular premiership outfit to being able to survive relegation each season in the second tier. There was always reasons we couldn''t get the job done: we had to sell players, our wage bill was too high, Delia did not invest enough, we didn''t sell enough tickets, we didn''t have enough players. McNally has no excuses. We will succeed at all costs. We will get the best at all costs. Lambert is the cream of the football league. He has the winning instinct and it has been installed into all of our players, and there is no need to look further than our captain Holt. A man who fights for everything on the pitch. I felt that when we got promoted we lost a lot of our heroes and never replaced them; Malkay, Iwan (and later on Fleming) all left, and Worthy was sold down the river by Doncaster who''s eyes were firmly off the field too often. I feel that things have turned full circle again, we have a long way to go, but I have no doubt that McNally, Lambert and the players will keep fighting to win till the last.

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[quote user="thebigfeller"]Really superb OP, and one we can all relate to, I think. There aren''t many things in life which can move an entire community; but football can, and that makes Lambert and McNally - for now at least - heroes. Because they''ve turned our whole club around, and given us our pride back. Something which looked a million years away at Charlton, or on August 8, or as the club drifted helplessly during those horrible last two seasons in the Championship. Amongst the players, who could the fans identify with? Hardly anyone in truth. Even the board had essentially given up, as they openly admitted: they had no vision, no plan, no hope (other than blind faith, that is).Now look at us. I think history will record that the decline in our fortunes began with one six-goal humiliation, and ended with another. Sandwiched in between was all sorts of rubbish, caused above all by the pathetic, self-defeating ethos of this club. Whisper it, but five months before Fulham, Brian Woolnough spotted it and commented on it. This made him Public Enemy Number 1 - but was he wrong? The team and manager were cowards that day at Chelsea, as they were at Fulham, and at Charlton, and on opening day against Colchester. Something was rotten at the heart of this club: that something was, literally, heart, pride and desire to be the absolute best we could be, regardless of finance, or the tired old excuses Delia or Doncaster would forever trot out. All of which left many of us disillusioned, almost disconnected on some level. We still loved the club, but wanted so much better for it than those at the helm appeared to: something I concluded not through their words, but their deeds and above all, their attitudes. It was the attitude of losers, and must never, ever happen again.But then came Charlton, and at length, Colchester. If this didn''t wake people up, nothing ever would - and look at the difference real vision, drive and energy can give a football club. Look at the difference a genuinely positive approach instead of excuses and pointing out how unfair modern football is can make. Saturday showed how far we''ve come, and hinted at how much more is possible if we keep it up - and in the case of all of us now, I think it''s safe to say that we''ve got our Norwich mojos back.[/quote]Absolutely a top post! agree with every word of this BF,as well as those of Hardhouse44 in his opening of the thread.

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