Match Day Thread Norwich city versus Crystal Palace

Farke should keep on doing what he's doing for sure but for whatever reasons we are the worst side in this league on points.

Which is how managers are judged

 

I like your confidence

 

Cantwell has the strongest links to the club, growing up in the area and being a boyhood fan but he has arguably been one of not just ours but the leagues best midfielders this season. He is still a bit raw at times but he is certainly one that you could see a big team coming in for and that would be a very hard decision for him to turn down for his career

 

With the money floating about for surviving sides a young England midfielder consistently scoring will be minimum £20m with lost revenues the club would bank that for the future .

Which is our long term plan , self sustaining over **** or bust .

 

You mean players like Pritchard, how did that work out. Most of our promising youngsters do have a good longer term connection to the club. If the bond of the group is as strong as it appears I can see by far the majority of the squad at least being willing to be persuaded to give a season in the championship a go, at least until January 2021. Of course a lot of the team won't get better offers than they're already on. Yes we may lose 1 or 2, but that will free up cash for further acquisitions

 

One arm denies us an extra 2 points and one foot denies us 3 points. Fortune is not smiling on us. When your luck is out.................

Will strengthening the squad make the difference to our chances of survival?

 

I think actually pretty much everyone on here is being reasonably philosophical about being relegated and the wheres and the whys.

Nobody is advocating splashing the cash in January and I think we all accepted in the summer that by spending no money this season would be a tough ask.

We remain good to watch, keep plugging away and maybe the wins will come. I still think we need eight wins from our remaining matches. Almost impossible, but let’s keep heads up.

No point spending much this January other than investments for the future.

 

One positive - the last couple of draws have also looked worse for us as everyone around us has been winning.

It’s already quite an unusual season for how many points bottom half teams are getting - look at the league table. Not many draws.

I think the second half of the season will be a bit more normal.

 

Pukki plays every game because he's our talisman and rarely has an off day so a striker would be pointless.
We have a group of decent midfielders, shame they haven't chipped in with a few goals , our wing backs are all decent and I'm happy with Zimmermann and Handley as centre backs they are performing well.
If money is spent I would go for another centre back so we don't need to play 2 midfielders as cover.

Who ?

Some cheap guy with Bundesliga experience preferably German .

This season is just a ground hog day of we should of won.

 

Of all our young hopefuls Cantwell is probably the one I would be most happy to let go. The one I would be keenest to keep is Godfrey and 2 from Aarons, Lewis & Byram.

Of the rest of the players I'd be keenest to keep would be Krul, McLean, Hernandez, Zimmermann, Hanley.

Clearly I would love to keep Pukki and he with the possible exception of Krul plays in a position where we don't have very much quality in depth. It would really depend who we had lined up to replace Pukki, perhaps Rhodes and another.

If we do go down, which is still by no means certain, but looking more likely by the week we will be in significantly better position than we were last time.

 

and of course we're unbeaten in 2020

 

I barely got to watch any of the game, but Emi's numbers on Whoscored are darn good:
9.3 rating (MotM)
9 tackles
6 dribbles
5 key passes
Only his dispossessed of 5 mars his stats

He's having a great season with a last place team. I can see Webber demanding £30 mil for him and getting it.

 

One thing that does frustrate me is when he does lose the ball he often spends a lots of effort waving his hands and complaining, rather than trying to get the ball back. Something that has for me become more noticeable recently.

 

Yes, that bugs the hell of me when players do that. Emi does it, Cantwell does it, Maddison was terrible about it. The ref is never going to change his mind just because a player acts up about not getting a call.

 

It's unusual because no one is particularly poor, even us at the bottom. As I said in an earlier post, there are about a dozen teams with very little indeed between them. They are all beating each other, which may mean the old target of 40 points is relevant after a few seasons where the big teams slaughtered everyone else so 36 was becoming more of a target for safety.

I also agree with Rob that we will need 8 wins now, which is pretty unlikely but not totally impossible.

 

I’m glad someone has said this as it’s been frustrating the hell out of me for weeks now, he loses his head for 30 seconds gesticulating at the referee, meanwhile the opposition have played in and he’s miles out of position! He needs to get his head down and get on with it, he has been fantastic since he’s come back into the starting 11, just need to add some goals from him!

 

I'm committed to the long-term plan, so won;t complain if we do go down as at least we'll be financially sound. It's the loss of players that I'll regret most.

 

This season illustrated

 

Agree with this. We have a handful of players who are really coming on leaps and bounds. I fear, as with Maddison, we might sell them before their best.

 

No he shouldn't, because he hasn't! What I mean is, he's now fielding starting elevens which are ill-equipped to do what he has previously insisted on, namely playing out from the back even when we are being pressed high, which we inevitably are if we try, correctly, to protect a lead.

Yesterday was a prime example, captured by this spot on post from Canary Rob: " ......... Far too often we get caught on the break when we have the lead and that puts us in our most vulnerable position - exactly how Tottenham came back. We can’t seem to defend on the break. So I would rather we try sitting back for once and playing on the break ourselves. Annoyingly, though, we can do very little when Pukki is on his own...."

The difference between yesterday and, for instance, the Man City game, was that, whereas yesterday we resorted to relieving the pressure by booting the ball forward, thus presenting possession back to Palace and starting the cycle over and over again, against Man City we played our way out through the high press with slick, triangular passing up the touchline, predominantly the left touchline. How come we were able to do that against Man City but not against the much inferior Palace? Answer, we didn't have the right players on the pitch in the right positions. Despite being recalled against Spurs, Stiepermann was dropped, depriving us of the player who knits our slick forward passing moves together. Despite being recalled against Spurs, Lewis was dropped, depriving us of a LB who has a whole season's experience behind him of the kind of possession-retaining passing out from the back up the left touchline we needed (as well as being completely familiar with the slick combination play involving Stiepermann, Buendia and Cantwell or Hernandez). That style of play doesn't come naturally to either Vrancic or McLean (in contrast to the forgotten man, Leitner); both are more direct and specialise in longer passes. If the idea of playing those two was that McLean, in the advanced role, would provide a let out ball, it didn't work.

What DF should do if he is, as DD says, "to keep on doing what he's doing", is revert to what he did against Man City. Set the team up to play counter-attacking football predicated on winning possession deep and passing our way out at speed through the opposition press to expose the opposition back line. And he should select the players who have shown themselves best able to do it. Our chances of survival lessen by the match, so let's stick to the Man City blueprint and in the process recall the likes of Leitner and Amadou from the Gulag to which they appear to have been consigned.