Goals, Goals, Goals! But Now What? | OneFootball

After a week dominated by a “no shots on target” narrative, clinically dispatching five past Swansea was quite the timely and satisfying response. It was a flattering scoreline, and a much tighter game than the four-goal margin of victory suggests, but just goes to show what having an actual striker – the best in the Championship no less (I will die on this hill) – can do for you, and if you stick to the set of principles you laid out from day one.

Norwich have been without Josh Sargent for around three months. They’re still currently without Borja Sainz, Marcelino Núñez and Anis Ben Slimane who have been instrumental to flowing HoffBall, and similarly thumping home wins earlier in the season. Any Championship side, however, would be much weaker without them. And the vast majority of them will also struggle, and have already struggled, to get anything from trips to Bramall Lane and Elland Road. It’s been an odd time for patience, with what is a transition season, to wear thin and for week-to-week revisionism.

Despite the clear messaging that this is the beginning of a wholesale rebuild, many are measuring this season against last, and indeed most of our recent Championship seasons. Last season we pushed all the chips to the middle of the table with an ageing squad and a manager who knew he was something of a lame duck once Webber had handed the keys to Knapper. We made the so-called promised land of the playoffs, but promotion didn’t bear thinking about.

What we got over the summer was what we wanted, right? A reset, a realignment, a long-term vision to buy into, and a new, energetic, head coach and sporting director to once again actually communicate to us what a Norwich City team should, and will, look like. As tired a cliche as it is, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Norwich had just finished sixth, but they were in no way a playoff team. And then they lost two of their chief goal contributors in the summer window.

Yet, on a weekly basis this season, you don’t have to scroll too far or listen to any sort of audio or video content for too long to see or hear talk of the playoffs and how close, or how far, we are away from them. It’s usually framed ominously like “this is a crucial period if Norwich are to make the top six” or “if Norwich are to make the top six they can ill afford injuries in the FA Cup”. It’s almost as if there are dire consequences of not making it. Yet, internally, and they’ve told us as such, this isn’t a hard and fast objective. Not for this first season of the new regime.

That doesn’t mean this season is a write off. Much like how 2018/19 doesn’t happen without the, at times turbulent, 2017/18 that preceded it, the remainder of this season is critical, but not purely in terms of wins and losses. It will, in one way or another, set the course for the next handful of years. Many of us wanted to pull the plug back in 2018. Maybe the club would’ve done too, had Ipswich won the derby in the early knockings of that magical season.

Progress was never going to be about league positions – those placed 7th to 21st, and indeed three of those finishing 3rd to 6th, are all rewarded the same anyway: with another year in the Championship. The goal should never be to make the playoffs, the goal should be to win the playoffs – last season’s postseason adventure did nothing for us. It makes no sense to demand a playoff push while, at the same time, admitting this squad is still some way off reflecting a fully-formed Johannes Hoff Thorup squad – never mind being recognising we’re woefully equipped for the step up (the proof lies in this year’s cup ties).

Rather, the KPIs (certainly of this first season) should be laser-focused on the development of young players, the settling of Knapper’s first wave of recruits into English football, and the establishment of an identity that we simply haven’t had post-pandemic. If there’s little to no evidence of those elements coming along, then that is obviously fair game for criticism.

Surely we can all see the theory behind HoffBall – heck, we’ve won games with scorelines of 4-1, 4-0, 4-2, 6-1 and now 5-1. There’s also been a breathless 3-3 draw (possibly the best Carrow Road game for some five years?) and a euphoric, come-from-behind, stoppage time victory. It’s fair to say that the execution has been consistently inconsistent. All of these highlights have come at home, and those who regularly travel far and wide have been seeing a very different version of Norwich City – much like last year. Unlike this time last year, however, the ROI on one of the most expensive home season tickets outside the top flight hasn’t been much of a talking point. That’s a marked improvement.

No shots on target across two games away from home isn’t an acceptable trend, of course it isn’t, but as Connor Southwell said himself in a recent post-match review for the Pink Un, it isn’t really a useful metric to judge the team on right now. Perhaps, however, and it’s rare I criticise those guys who bring us such great coverage, titles of videos and articles referring to us being “blunt” or shot-shy aren’t the most helpful and will trigger the less patient, reactionary fans who will be baying for blood if Norwich dare finish mid table – even if it is the most accurate assessment and immediate takeaway from a game.

I thought Thorup in his pre-match presser ahead of Leeds was excellent, as he often is, in explaining why we’re persisting in playing the way we are. Essentially it boils down to creating a game with fewer duels, more control and leaving less of the buildup play to chance. He also outlined the futility of registering shots on target if they’re simply hopeful long-range efforts that bobble through to a goalkeeper who can make a cup of tea before saving. Instead, if there’s another pass which can turn a good chance into a great chance, that’s what we’ll look to do. See the opening goal on Saturday as a perfect example.

Again, we’ve spent the past three seasons craving a team with a clear identity and way of playing – specifically good, passing football. We can’t now, after a few months, backpedal and say “no, not that identity” and “yeah, but we need to also go up”. The results will come, and be sustainable, if we drill this into the current players now and recruit more who can easily fit into it.

Those excellent performances and results we have seen from earlier in the season, and on Saturday, are real and aren’t a fluke. We’ve seen what a Thorup side with McLean, Núñez, Slimane, Sainz and Sargent all available and fully fit can do to teams at this level. The drop off in quality when swapping these out for fringe options is quite pronounced, as it was last season. With the way Thorup is coaching the side, those who aren’t regularly picked do appear to be square pegs being used in round holes when they do have to fill in. Again, that’s going to take two or three more windows for that particular problem to recede. And not having those players get injured and, most critically, suspended for chunks of games would also help!

The jury is very much out on all of Knapper’s signings so far, except Callum Doyle (he’s top class, sadly he won’t be ours beyond May). And it’s only fair that that is the case. I do feel that Ante Crnac isn’t being given the type of service he needs when playing up top, and we often look like we’re playing around him. I also feel Amankwah Forson, aside from two magic moments against Coventry, has struggled with the pace of the league since his initial, brilliant, cameo.

Rewind seven years though and you can pretty much copy and paste that for how I felt about Mario Vrančić. And I had no idea what Marco Stiepermann brought to the table. While we all want to see flashes of potential now, history has taught us that it may not be a requirement for these players to turn out good. Similarly, I’ve seen plenty to believe that Oscar Schwartau will be a hell of a player by the time he turns 21 – but there’s plenty of time for that to turn out wrong. Season 2 will be an entirely separate chapter of their Norwich careers.

I get it, we don’t pay money to attend games now, to watch players now, and to try and read between tea leaves and foresee future wins and success. We probably don’t watch season 2 of a show if season 1 has been mixed at best. We all want to see a win on a Saturday, or a Tuesday or Wednesday night, of course we do. I’ll be making the four-hour journey to Hull next month hoping for that instant gratification too, but knowing that performances are more of a priority for now and perhaps more telling of what 2025/26 and 2026/27 have in store than eking out a narrow win. We’ve seen plenty of those in the last two seasons and they’ve had no bearing on this campaign, and we called them as such at the time.

Results are needed, but only enough of them for everyone behind the scenes to keep faith in the ongoing transition and see it through into years 2 and 3. Each and every game between now and Cardiff (H) on the final day is an important building block.

We’ll revisit all of this in a year or so to see how much we learned.