On football and snakes | OneFootball

Brutus. Benedict Arnold. Ephialtes. Andy Marshall. These are the names of those who snide, who stab us in the back, who we give our utmost trust, only for it to be swept away.

Betrayal, while not the worst, is certainly the lowest of crimes, and as such, it is why the most famous snake of them all – and whose name has become a synonym for the act – Judas Iscariot was placed right in the centre of the mouth of Lucifer himself in Dante’s Ninth, and final, Circle of Hell.

And so it is, for the first time in several decades, that we Norwich fans face a betrayal like no other. One of our players – a player we took to our hearts, roared on, made memes about, put on the back of our shirts – is signing for Ipswich Town. The most despicable act of them all. It’s painful. It’s shocking. And, yes, we are angry.

Some are apologists. Makes good business sense, they say, and football is a business, they say. Nonsense.

Despite everything, there remains, at least so we thought, unwritten codes in football, no matter what the Huel-swilling data nerds tell us. Some things are just never done even if, financially, they make a lot of sense. They are part of sport’s core subconscious principles. The indescribables and idiosyncrasies that make sport different to any other type of business, and what gives it its lore. Wimbledon is never played on hard court. The Ashes is always test matches. And Norwich City should never, ever, sell first-team players to Ipswich Town.

The player in question, and I dare not speak his name for it might bring plague to our crops, may well have wanted away. We were supposedly left with no option. Yet this points to something deeper. What on earth has happened at the club for one of our best players (yes, he was – you cannot rewrite history), to decide to throw everything in and take off down the A140? The excuses of “he had his mind set on it and there was nothing we could do” actually cause more questions than they answer. If money was an issue, then we are told by the Attanasio camp that we are no longer need to be a selling club. On the other hand, if money wasn’t an issue and he wanted to leave for other reasons, what exactly were these? If we have fucked something up so badly that a player had his head turned by…ugh…Ipswich, then we have a right to know what exactly it was.

Let’s not forget, Ipswich are a direct divisional rival. From a purely football point of view, this sale does not make much sense. Yes, there’s thirty pieces of silver in the bank and a Dane on his way that no one has heard of except the aforementioned data nerds, but we’ve been noticeably poorer this season without 🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍 than with him. Indeed, I thought (through my walnut-sized football brain, admittedly) he made the difference in the win against Portsmouth. If he clicks down there and they get promoted thanks to him while we languish in mid-table with yet more talk of “time to gel” and “transitional seasons”, then that £10m suddenly looks very small indeed.

Norwich have, quite frankly, been shit so far this season. Selling one of our most creative players to the devil himself was not going to make any sort of appeasement to the plebeians, and I now really fear for how things are going to go. Not only that, Ben Knapper better have some actual answers as to whether he actually thought about how badly this would go down. If he didn’t, then I am afraid we might have just become another football club handed over to the data nerds and accountants.