It might have been 370 days since the last one but that feeling of a Norwich City home defeat is all too familiar.
It even has a unique sound. The noise that greets the final whistle at Carrow Road when the Canaries have lost is a sort of slow rumbling Norfolk grumble.
There was the odd boo but most supporters were more disappointed than angry. Sometimes, like at Cardiff a week earlier, a loss can come as a complete shock. That’s if a cruel late goal (or two) swiftly snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
Against Bristol City at the weekend it was clear from relatively early in the piece that Norwich were going to struggle to score once never mind twice.
Nahki Wells had expertly fired home the visitor’s second goal on 63 minutes so by the time the ref did eventually put Norwich fans out of their misery they’d had half an hour to get their heads round a first home defeat in more than a year.
The trudge out of the ground and back to the car after a home defeat is always a solemn one. The group therapy begins on Carrow Bridge and continues off into Riverside, the city centre and the pubs and fish and chip shop queues of rural Norfolk.
Notes are compared on who was most to blame, what the manager got wrong and which players should never wear the shirt again.
All with the benefit of 20/20 glorious technicolour hindsight. Then come the grand statements about this lot not being a patch on the ’59ers, the team from the 1970s or the squad that beat Bayern Munich, depending on the age of the complainant.
I remember being carried along by the throng of Canaries fans out of the old South Stand and up Thorpe Road when I first started going in the late 1980s and early 90s. Most weeks someone would loudly declare that they were so frustrated that they were finished with wasting their precious Saturday afternoons in the name of that bunch of letdowns.
The cold autumnal air often meant you could just about see the steam coming out of their ears. Even as the crowd dispersed you knew you’d see them again at the next game in a fortnight.
This is all part of being a football supporter. When you get a season ticket or decide to attach yourself to a club you are buying in for miserable 2-0 home defeats by Bristol City in November just as much as the good times that will be around the corner at some point. How long the road is before that corner is turned is anybody’s guess.
Each football club has two separate story lines running parallel at all times. One is the immediate form of the team. Three straight defeats for Norwich City and one win in eight with a series of injuries and suspensions. That aspect of all things Canary is not rosy at all at the moment.
There is also the bigger picture as to the general direction the club is travelling in. It feels, for now at least, that most Norwich fans are encouraged by that.
You can never speak for all of the thousands of different opinions about City but I get the impression that the overriding feeling is that the Johannes Hoff Thorup, Ben Knapper, Mark Attanasio combination of head coach sporting director, club owner still has plenty of confidence.
A 2-0 home defeat by Bristol City may well have caused a more angry reaction had it occurred in the latter days of the David Wagner, Stuart Webber, Delia and Michael era when patience was wearing thin.
Birmingham City beat Norwich 1-0 on the final day of last season but were relegated to League One anyway. Blues fans were not as cross about their demotion as I expected them to be. There was an acceptance of their fate and an expectation that their new American owners would eventually deliver a huge turnaround in fortunes.
Things shouldn’t get quite that drastic for Norwich City but they may well have to take more steps back in order to ultimately progress again. The amount of change over the past 12 months rarely leads to overnight success.
If it’s another 370 days before the Norfolk grumble is back I’ll be surprised. However, the opening months of this season have provided enough reassurance that a less depleted Norwich squad should keep games alive and entertaining well beyond the 63rd minute.
Injury woe...
Norwich City’s injury woes are even worse than anybody realised. Assistant head coach Glen Riddersholm is also suffering from a knee problem.
Johannes Hoff Thorup’s number 2 was good enough to support a swimming challenge in aid of BBC Children in Need last week. He joined us at the pool at David Lloyd Norwich on Friday morning to watch myself and four Radio Norfolk colleagues swim a mile each.
It was the last of five successive days of swimming with BBC staff members collectively clocking up 1000 miles between Monday and Friday.
Glen cheered enthusiastically from poolside as we got in the water at about 6.30 on Friday morning. That was after revealing that he’s a natural early riser and often heads out for a run at around 4am.
That’s all on hold at the moment though, he revealed, because of a meniscus issue suffered during a game of padel alongside Thorup. They took on Ben Knapper and the club’s finance director Anthony Richens.
I imagine the assistant head coach is some way down the queue when it comes to the treatment room.
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