City taking the Michael giving man of the match to Hoolahan

Norwich dodged a bullet today with a 4-2 home win over Sheffield United in a game that could and probably should have ended in a draw at the very best. Credit to City though who turned a 2-1 half-time defecit into a 4-2 victory in an exciting second half that more than made up for a dismal first 45.
Whoever it is that decides the Man of the Match can’t have had too hard a job giving it to Wes Hoolahan, after all it was just a few seconds after he’s tapped home City’s fourth to end the growing Sheffield United pressure in the last 15 minutes or so of the game.
Somewhere in the world of football rules that don’t actually exist is the rule that means if you score a hat-trick you get the match ball and almost certainly get the man of the match award, but I am sure I am not the only Canary fan who tonight thinks it should have gone to Michael Nelson.
City’s number five had a superb afternoon in a makeshift defensive line – no Elliot Ward and no Leon Barnett meant starts for Nelson and Jens Berthel Askou and it wasn’t only Sheffield United that must have been rubbing their hands at the thought of facing that paring.
I gobbled up the scarcely believable even money on over 2.5 goals in this game before heading up to Norwich today and when I saw that pairing I was pretty confident my £200 would easily be doubled.
Betting on Norwich and watching them is not always easy. While I’d always prefer City to win above all else, cashing in on them is also a great feeling and after a woeful opening quarter of an hour I was gently pumping my arm in my Jarrold Stand seat after Andy Reid gave United the lead. Now the stage was set for a Norwich 2-1 win and a nice little festive win.
There’s something about Norwich this season, particularly at home that means they play much better when they’ve gone a goal behind. In some games – such as Leicester and Burnley they’ve needed to concede to come out and attack a team in their normal way and today was similar. Thankfully within two minutes of going a goal down, that man Nelson had headed home an easy goal and it was 1-1. Game on.
A word about Nelson then. This was the last game of 2010 and it’s been an amazing transition for Norwich. A year ago they were about to go on that fabulous January run of five straight wins which included that awesome 5-0 revenge thumping against Colchester.
I was at the first game of this year, the 1-0 win at Wycombe and so was Nelson. He had a bit of a stinker in that game and I can recall several occasions when Fraser Forster rolled the ball out to Nelson in the centre of defense and he looked up and just could not do anything with the ball. He just didn’t look like a footballer.
When Gary Doherty left in the summer and new recruits were signed in defence, most City fans probably thought that was Nelson’s lot, but credit to the man who scored some vital goals for City last term, he’s not put a foot wrong this term in his four league appearances and his goal was another really big one today.
Nelson’s goal all but guaranteed a winning punt for me but the payout came quicker than expected as within ten minutes of the equaliser, Richard Cresswell had found time and space in the box to slot past John Ruddy. Managerless Sheffield United were 2-1 up. I was £200 up.
I must have been the only City fan with a smile on their face at half-time, but thought naturally turned to how Norwich were going to get something out of the game. What had started as a three-man attack with Grant Holt, Chris Martin and Simeon Jackson changed at the interval to a two-man strikeforce – Jackson making way for Wes Hoolahan.
Did Hoolahan change the game? Well not really. There was little between the teams for much of the second half but a stumbling Grant Holt won Norwich a penalty, converted by Wes for 2-2 and then a handball in the box made it 3-2 with another penalty.
I felt sorry for Jackson again – he did little wrong, but you could argue he did little right. He certainly was no better or worse than Chris Martin who was hardly in the game in my opinion.
Still with four in midfield it gave City far more width and when Anthony McNamee came on that was really exploited. Our midfield has been immense this season, but today, Korey Smith apart, it was two pretty poor performances from David Fox and Andrew Crofts.
That Norwich won 4-2 does little but put a nice gloss on a good match but not the greatest City performance. Make no mistake, The Blades were in this game right until Hoolahan tapped home Holt’s pass deep into stoppage time. Seconds later it could and should have been 3-3 with Daniel Bogdanovic going close.
But the history books will show a 4-2 win with half-time sub Hoolahan scoring a Carrow Road hat-trick one month to the day that somebody else did against another team struggling near the bottom!
They’ll also show that on a day when Leeds and Cardiff threw away leads and points, Norwich end 2010 just a point off second place, albeit five places off the top.
Yes, we’re a point off second place and automatic promotion to the Premier League at the halfway point of the season. That’s us – Norwich City. Last year we were relegated from this division! Last year we were losing 7-1 at home to Colchester! This term we were supposed to struggle!
But no. We’ve got QPR and Cardiff at home in the next two home league games and I for one hope Michael Nelson plays and performs like a rock in both of them.
Happy New Year everyone – let’s hope the next six months at Norwich City are as great as the last six.

Grant Holt's festive Norwich City dilemma

I guess it’s a sign of how well our season is going that has given rise to rumours circulating about the Norwich City future of Grant Holt.
Despite The Canaries this week releasing a short and succinct statement saying ‘He’s not for sale’, our Captain Fantastic has been linked with possible moves to Wigan, West Ham, Bolton and Blackpool when the transfer window opens in just over a week.
Trying not to be biased for a minute, I’m not sure this is the right time for Holt to move.
I know he’s a Carlisle man and it is believed he spends a fair bit of time going back to that part of the world to see his family. This would make a move to the north west ideal for him. But is Wigan or Blackpool in January 2011 the place he really wants to be?
Not since Dean Ashton departed from Carrow Road five January transfer windows ago has such a key player left the club and a move to the top flight right now would be quite remarkable for Holt.
For a modern day footballing journeyman, Holt’s career has really taken off in the last 18 months. A year and a half ago he was a Shrewsbury player, filling his boots with goals galore in League Two.
Bryan Gunn signed him in the summer of 2009 and he starred in League One alongside Wes Hoolahan and Chris Martin before returning to the Championship where he’d previously played for Nottingham Forest and Sheffield Wednesday.
I remember seeing Holt for the first time in a Norwich shirt against Wigan on the final day of July the summer before last in a pre-season friendly.
Norwich beat Wigan 3-2 that day and Holt looked great getting stuck in against Titus Bramble just seven days before the 7-1 home demolition by Colchester that pretty much defined our League One campaign.
This season, well more specifically, in the last four weeks, Holt’s stock has really risen. That treble against Ipswich on the telly, how we missed him against Portsmouth and that brace at Coventry have underlined how massively important a player he is for us to keep.
Should Norwich fail to make it to the Premier League this season it is likely that we will either be knocked out in the play-offs or fall just outside the top six. That would be a remarkable achievement given where the club was when Holt joined.
I don’t think any Norwich fan would begrudge Holt moving on in the summer to pastures new , I am sure we would all do the same in our late 20s having never played in the Premier League.
But is a certain relegation fight at the likes of Wigan or West Ham really the right move for a man valued at £2 million?
I’m sure Holt knows that he’d be thrown in to the deep end and there’s a huge chance he’d end up back in the Championship next summer. He certainly won’t get as much joy up front against the likes of Nemanja Vidic as he did against Damien Delaney.
So why not wait? Fair enough, City don’t make it up and he goes and joins a team like QPR in the Premier League. That would be a good move for him. He’d be there from the start of the season and I for one would wish him all the best.
But for the skipper to leave in January with Norwich poised for a potential shot at the Premier League? It makes no sense.
Holt is loved by this club and I am sure he’d have far more pride captaining Norwich in the Premier League than being booed next autumn at Carrow Road in the colours of someone like West Ham.
Games against QPR and Middlesbrough at the start of January could shape our season. Lose them both, slip down the table and Holt could be left out of the side against Leyton Orient which would be ominous.
But a New Year’s Day hammering of QPR and something from Middlesbrough would send out the message that in 2011, City are promotion contenders and, more importantly, Grant Holt really is not for sale.

Hornby, Rennick, Imlach, Kuper and er, Richards!

David Rennick’s book on Muhammad Ali, King Of The World, was named the best ever sports book in The Times this week, but I’m hoping to knock it off its next year.
While that probably won’t realistically happen, I’ll be joining the list of great sports novelists in the new year with the release of my first novel, Memorabilia.
The Times list of the top 50 sports books sadly excluded my first book, Touchdown UK, which I’m sure was number 51 (they have to cut the list of somewhere I naturally told myself), but looking down the list at all the great books I’ve read was really comforting.
My bookshelf at home and that Times list share some great reads, Simon Kuper’s, Football Against The Enemy, Eamon Dunphy’s A Strange Kind of Glory, Full Time The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino, My Father and Other Working Class Football Hero’s by the great Gary Imlach, The Damned United by David Peace, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and All Played Out by Pete Davis.
I though Duncan Hamilton‘s Brian Clough memoir Provided You Don’t Kiss Me should have made the list, but I was really pleased that my favourite sports book of all time is sitting on there at 23.
That book is David Winner’s book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football which was published in 2000. As a man with a Dutch influence in my family it’s a great dissection of the Dutch psyche, and analyses why the country as a whole is transfixed by the idea of glorious failure as opposed to the Germanic way of victory above all.
It’s almost a decade since I first read that book, and I’m hoping that people will take to my sports-based novel Memorabilia in the same way.
While Nick Hornby wrote about being a football fan and we’ve had a plethora of books on being a hooligan, watching football around the world and following individual teams, my book is one of few out there based around the sporting themes of gambling and sports memorabilia.
It’s set mainly in East Anglia in the summer of 2010 and involves two main characters at different stages of their careers as collectors and being sports fans. It’s being release in February through Grosvenor House – watch this space for more info!

Golden fail on the Golden Goal

It was while reading the excellent Norwich City blog Sing Up The River End the other week that got me thinking back to the golden days of the Golden Goal cards at Carrow Road.
As a kid I used to watch the games and then wonder why they always read out the goal times and why, a couple of minutes later a couple of old boys in white coats would trudge around the ground holding up a board with the exact time of the goal displayed with plastic numbers on hooks. Fast forward a generation or so and I’ve got to say I’m hooked on the Golden Goal cards on sale at Carrow Road. Forget the punters gathering around the various outlets of Ladbrokes trying to guess the first goalscorer and correct score, I’d rather invest some cash in these rather addictive little scratch cards.
For the uninitiated, you for £1 you get two goal times, one in each half. Match the time of the first goal and you win £500. The prizes tail off dramatically after that – goal two secures a Freeview Box, goal three a signed football, and then it’s down to a £25 voucher, followed by a tenner if there’s a fifth goal or more.
But you also get a lucky number which wins you the man of the match’s signed shirt. That’s the bigger draw for me and I’ve developed a mini-obsession with trying to win it.
Normally I pick up a couple of cards – at £1 each, they make the perfect use of the £7 change I’d get from buying a programme with a tenner. I don’t eat or drink at the football and, rather than burning my lips on a Cornish Pasty (Ipswich at home, 2006) or scorching my mouth on a pie (Nottingham Forest away, 2001) or buying a beer (can I be the only man who at the age of 35 has never had a beer at a football match in England) I’d rather spend the cash on Golden Goal cards.
I’ve been so close on so many times – against Colchester last year (the 7-1) I was six seconds away from getting the opening goal time correct and twice this season I’ve missed out on the shirt by less than three numbers.
Last Saturday against Porstmouth I decided to go for it. I invested £20 in the cards, which I picked up from four different sellers around the ground. I made a note of the goal times and lucky numbers in my phone and scratched them off after the game.
I knew the lucky number was 0772 and that would win Wes Hoolahan’s signed shirt. After 19 unsuccessful cards I came to the last one, scratched it off really slowly and the first three numbers were ‘077’. My heart started to thump. From a one in a thousand chance I was down to a one in ten chance.
In more ways than one, I just needed a number two!
With one big brave scratch I scraped a way that last bit of silver foil to reveal a number.... four.
Damn you Golden Goal cards, you’ll be the death of me until I win, but I’ll keep on going!

Jackson blows his big chance in poor home loss to Portsmouth

Norwich lost 2-0 at home to Portsmouth today, and while the result was hard to take given the euphoria around Carrow Road 13 days, ago, I think it’s important we remember how far we’ve come in the past year.
Twelve months ago tonight I was sitting in a Travelodge in Somerset watching the X-Factor final while my missus was wolfing down a box of Tofifee (boy do I know how to party!) and I myself was digesting Norwich’s last minute 3-3 draw at Yeovil.
Yes, Norwich were relying on a last minute Gary Doherty goal to earn a point against Yeovil, a team now facing the cold reality that they could be playing League Two football next season.
Today we lost at home to Portsmouth, a team that were playing in the FA Cup final last season, a team that won the FA Cup two years ago, were locking horns with AC Milan at Fratton Park two winters ago.
When you think of it like that, this loss isn’t really that hard to stomach.
And, when you think that in the last 13 days we’ve hammered our nearest rivals, and gained a brilliant three points at one of our promotion rivals, to lose this game wasn’t that bad. To take six points from three games is a good total, and I don’t think there was a City fan at Carrow Road today who would rather have lost to Portsmouth than either Derby or Ipswich.
Back to today’s game – with Grant Holt suspended Simeon Jackson started up front with Chris Martin and it was the Canadian’s big chance in the spotlight. Could he provide the same threat in front of goal as the Carlisle-born striker Holt?
Well, not really.
And I have sympathy for Jackson, who was given a pretty poor service from midfield. He kept on making those runs and there just wasn’t that killer pass that he needed to get a decent shot on target.
When he did find himself in acres of space in front of goal in the first half it was no surprise that he fluffed his lines.
This game reminded of me of when Hull came to Carrow Road in September. City were all over the opponents in the first half, they really were, but despite winning loads of corners and piling on the pressure, Pompey’s defence was pretty solid and kept Norwich out.
Portsmouth created nothing at all and when Liam Lawrence won a corner in added time at the end of the first half, the limit of their intent was pretty clear. Lawrence took so long to take it that the ref gave up and blew the whistle for the start of the interval.
Pompey seemed like they were only at Carrow Road to head back down south with a point, but when David Nugent suddenly burst into life 20 minutes from time and slotted a pacey pass across the box for Dave Kitson, it was a case of déjà vu for City.
Just like the Hull game, we pressed for an equaliser but Jackson and Martin saw less and less of the ball and when Jackson was hauled off with 15 minutes and Oli Johnson made a rare appearance from the bench, you kind of knew that the Canadian had blown his chance.
David Nugent burst through in stoppage time, won a penalty, Leon Barnett was sent off and Greg Halford tucked away his spot kick. It finished 2-0.
Credit must go to Portsmouth – I mean how else do you play when you come to Carrow Road in 2010? Ipswich came and tried to play and got thumped. Teams like Hull, Pompey, even Middlesbrough, tried to nullify Norwich and that’s what teams have to do if they actually want to get something out of the game.
It works though – if you defend deep, play on the counter attack and frustrate Norwich you’re always going to stay in the game and that’s exactly what Portsmouth did.
Yes we missed Grant Holt badly today, we missed everything that his game brings – but Norwich need to realise that without him every move doesn’t have to consist of 15-20 intricate passes before fizzling out. It is actually OK to lump it into the box every now and then – other teams do it and it works.
When City ping the ball around the pitch, at times they’re as good as Arsenal or even Barcelona. That may sound a ridiculous comparison, but is there anything you see Messi, Wilsihere, Fabregas, Xavi and co do that City don’t produce?
Of course those other two teams are producing football at a far higher level, and they do it for much longer than Norwich, but sometimes the movement and energy that Paul Lambert has instilled in Norwich is that good.
And just like Arsenal and Barcelona, Norwich do sometimes slip up in their home games.