Paul Lambert’s summer rebuilding of Norwich City’s squad ahead of the forthcoming Premier League season has followed the theme of the summer of 2004 when Nigel Worthington added several players to the City squad.Seven years ago the flurry of new additions came in the wake of Ipswich Town defender Fabian Wilnis’ (pictured in Norwich's 2-0 win over Ipswich in December 2003) claims that Norwich needed to buy a whole new team if they were to compete in the Premier League.
That initial comment from the defender, now 40, came after Norwich had beaten Ipswich 3-1 at Carrow Road in March 2004. Asked about Norwich’s credentials should they be promoted to the Premier League, he said that Norwich weren’t good enough to top the table, and wouldn’t survive in the Premier League unless they signed 15 new players. He predicted we’d be relegated by Christmas.
That was a comment that’s certainly never been forgotten – and a comment for which I am pretty sure I am, if not totally responsible for, pretty much one of the reasons it was said in the first place.
Allow me to explain. In the process I will talk about Ipswich Town and the fact I used to work for the Evening Star and ended up editing The Green Un. Yes, a Norwich fan did edit the Green Un for two years.
I’ll take you back to the start of the last decade, well to the summer of 2000 to be precise. Norwich were about to sell Craig Bellamy and I had just quit my job in Norwich in the name of getting a place on the latest Archant (or Eastern Counties Newspapers as they were then) training course in Hastings.
Every year they took on a couple of reporters at the EDP and sent them on a four-month intensive training course in Hastings to learn law, shorthand and basic media training and I was desperate to get on the course in January 2001. I spent the summer trying to get a place as an EDP trainee reporter and failed twice. I was considering paying for myself to go to Harlow and train at the NTCJ college when a job at the Evening Star in Ipswich was advertised in the EDP.
It was September 2000 and I applied for the job along with 150 other people. The prize was a job as a trainee reporter and a place on the same training course (with the expensive course fees paid) that the EDP were sending their reporters.
I’ll cut to the chase: I got the job and ended up moving to Ipswich in April 2001, just as Ipswich Town were finishing fifth in the Premier League.
The 2001/02 season was really good, I spent that season covering news stories mainly in Ipswich while George Burley’s team, including Wilnis, were sliding down the top flight table. Norwich were of course on their way to finishing sixth in the old Division One and to the play-off final against Birmingham.
In late 2002, one of the members of staff who worked on The Green Un, the Ipswich version of the Pink Un, was told he was going to go to Hastings too and therefore they needed someone to replace him for six months.
It was a good move – a chance to learn how to sub (design newspaper pages) and to do something else other than cover news stories. I agreed to do it and between January and May 2003 I worked on the Green Un, mainly designing pages and writing the odd feature.
Half way through that stint came the 2-0 win for Ipswich at Carrow Road with Wilnis getting that opening goal. I took a fair bit of ribbing after that game, yet kept my professionalism by acting like it didn’t bother me.
That goal, coupled with the strike Wilnis scored in August 2000 against Manchester United at Portman Road, was semi-legendary around the Evening Star offices at that time and most Town fans loved the Dutch defender to bits.
In the summer of 2003 the Green Un editor decided to rekindle an old idea in that the paper would speak to a Town player each week and ghost write a column, which was apparently written by them. It’s a tried and trusted formula that’s been done to death in local papers, but after big success with a Kieron Dyer column in 1998, they thought it would be good to bring one back.
Fabian Wilnis’ name was suggested straight away by Portman Road Media and Communications supremo Terry Baxter and ahead of the first game of the season I went to interview new signing Kelvin Davis, while the editor went to interview Wilnis.
The Town number two appeared on that Saturday’s front page announcing he was the Green Un’s new signing and the new column was named Absolutely Fab. For the next four or five weeks it all went fine, with Wilnis giving gentle insights into his private life, revealing that he was learning the piano, that he loved his mum’s cooking and that he was good pals with fellow Dutch player Martijn Reuser.
With the season only a couple of weeks old, the editor announced he was leaving and a frantic search ensued for someone to take over. I saw the kudos and good experience that would come from editing a newspaper at the age of 28 and said I would do it. They knew I was a Norwich fan, but knew I was professional enough for it not to be an issue.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d have far rather been pulling the strings at the Pink Un and mixing with the likes of Phil Mulryne, Robert Green and Iwan Roberts that season, but it wasn’t to be.
As Green Un editor I went along to Town’s Playford Road training ground every week in the autumn of 2003 and fulfilled our agreement to speak to Wilnis. He was a good-natured pro, he seemed chatty and happy to talk about most stuff, and I’d say we started to build up a decent rapport.
That all changed though in December 2003. Wilnis knew I was a Norwich fan and we’d joked about it a few times, he also knew I had Dutch family and that was perhaps one reason why we got on quite well.
Norwich were, of course, taking Division One by storm that season and on Thursday, December 11, I went to speak to him for that Saturday’s paper. Wary that it was the last one before the derby preview edition the following Saturday, I asked Wilnis what he thought about Norwich and their season so far.
He responded along the lines of: “Norwich are a good team and they’re having a great season.” Knowing that he was a right back and that Norwich’s on loan left-sided player Darren Huckerby wouldn’t be playing at Portman Road (his loan ended the weekend before) I suggested to him that he might be glad the in-form Huckerby wasn’t playing.
He responded along the lines of: “Yes I’m pleased he isn’t playing, he’s having a great season.”
That was that. A harmless quote that was what I expected him to say. I wrote up a bit in that Saturday’s paper saying that he was looking forward to playing Norwich at Portman Road and that he thought they were a good team. I also said that he rated Hucks and was pleased he wasn’t playing in the game.
I thought nothing more of it until the following Thursday when I went down to the training ground to speak to him again and was ambushed by Terry Baxter who told me Wilnis was most upset at what I had written and that he’d never said anything like it.
Whether he’d received some ribbing off his team mates for admitting he liked Norwich or whether he wished he hadn’t said what he had is not known. The long and short of it was that Terry Baxter insisted that the club saw what would be written before it went to press and if the paper wasn’t happy with it, it was tough.
I stuck to my guns and told Ipswich Town that what I’d written had been said and that if Wilnis didn’t like it then there was no way we could work together.
The club came back and said that in future the Wilnis column had to be approved by them before it went to print. I wasn’t happy that they would have such control over what was said – I knew from the tone of the previous Wilnis columns that it was unlikely there were going to be any major revelations.
But that was the deal from Ipswich Town and being younger and headstrong I took a stance and wouldn’t budge. I told Ipswich that I didn’t want to do the Wilnis column if that was the condition and so it ended there and then. Being labelled as an admirer of Norwich seemed to anger Wilnis and seemed to crank up his dislike of the Canaries. I think, to be honest though, that he was simply a foreign footballer who thought the easiest way to win over the opposition fans was to slag off their nearest rivals.
I’d suggested he was actually an admirer of Norwich on the eve of a big local derby and that seemed to anger him into negative comments towards Norwich, with the comment about City needing a whole new Premier League squad some six months after our fall out, perhaps the best example.
The fact that Ipswich Town were happy to do another diary-style feature with a player the following year adds a bit of a mystery to the whole thing. Ian Westlake was chosen and we got on really well. He was a really exciting player at that time and we both had a big passion for films, we even started lending each other DVDs at one point.
I also interviewed several other Town players who were really nice and pleasant – Darren Bent, Jim Magilton, Jason De Vos and Drissa Diallo spring to mind as being really friendly.
Norwich fans of a certain intellect will probably be horrified I mingled with Town players, even that I worked on the Green Un in the first place, but my career was more important than any petty problems about working with Ipswich Town players.
Sure I had thoughts about slipping derogatory headlines about Ipswich and bumping up the Norwich City coverage in the paper, but these kind of thoughts soon evaporate when you're put in a position of responsability. I’m sure being a spy in the enemy camp fuels all sorts of imagination about what other Norwich fans would do in the same situation, but believe me, from someone who has been there; it just doesn’t work like that.
I enjoyed working in Ipswich for most of the time I was there; I never imagined I would work on a paper in Ipswich when I was a kid, nor that I would be editing the historic Green Un. It was something I don’t regret and the fact I was a Norwich fan was just a novelty really. I was seen as a professional kind of guy who had an interest in football ahead of any kind of cross-border rivalry.
Archant in Suffolk were 100 per cent behind me with the Wilnis situation and knew I wouldn’t have written anything that was never said, which was important.
Wilnis did seem to have a massive beef against Norwich and while Town fans understandably love it, us Norwich fans, myself included, certainly didn’t.
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