Reasons To Be Cheerful 5th DECEMBER 2009

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REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL....

So the good times are back for us Canary fans. Just listening to the buzz as you approach the ground, home or away, reading the EDP or the programme, listening to The Scrimmage or even Canary Call is enough to confirm it; we are out of the doldrums and football is fun again. We’ve certainly had to put up with some hard times and the FA Cup defeat at Carlisle was a harsh reminder of some of the recent miseries we’ve suffered on the road but the Southend performance quickly  banished the memory and normal service has been resumed.

At times like these I am reminded of the things I love about Norwich City Football Club and why I am eternally grateful for the accident of fate that caused me to support the Canaries and not some swanky, rich multi-national giant owned by an overseas billionaire. I lived in the Midlands as a lad where  my father was a sales rep and many of his clients were in the Food Industry.  In the school holidays I would often go with him on the road to keep him company. When he made a call at a client I would be left in the car to read or listen to the radio, usually for about an hour or so. As it happened one of his clients was Colman’s, and so I found myself one morning in the late sixties, a ten year-old lad sitting in a car park virtually outside a league football ground. Curiosity not surprisingly got the better of me and I decided to enter the ground for a closer look. I don’t know if I expected to be thrown out or what but in fact I was made very welcome by one or two men I encountered (to this day I have no idea who they were or what positions they held) and I was given a brief tour of one side of Carrow Road. I returned to the car a confirmed Norwich City supporter and that’s the way it has stayed, and one of the main reasons why I now live in Norfolk. My God, I’m glad my Dad didn’t have any clients in Ipswich!

I became a regular writer of letters to the club secretary who would send me programmes (which I still have) in exchange for  postal orders and my dad started to plan his trips to Colman’s to coincide with my holidays so that we could take in a match at Carrow Road each time. Thus was my football supporting life shaped and that’s how I came to appreciate some of the  qualities which our club possesses.

I love our kit. The first City sides I saw actually wore black shorts with two white stripes (circa 1968-9) but it’s the yellow shirt which is so special, isn’t it? I have always loved the fact that we are really famous for being the only team which has that particular colour as its first choice kit. We are, uniquely, ‘The Canaries’. A great nickname, too, isn’t it? And  there’s the badge. I still wish it was just the old canary as it was before the early seventies change  but I still think it’s the best club crest there is.

 Then there’s our song. Absolutely no other club has anything like ‘On The Ball, City’, do they? I reckon only Coventry’s song (that one that’s a sort of variation on the Eton boating song) comes even remotely close. It’s just so brilliantly, uniquely, our song with its wonderful resonances to the fifties and a bygone era and yet it’s still sung regularly at every game. I just love that song. It’s not nicked from a fifties musical nor shared with any other club. It’s ours.

I love our ground, too. Unpretentious but a proper ground, it wasn’t  rebranded as ‘The Mustard Pot’ when Colman’s sponsored us nor has it now become the ‘Aviva Stadium’, it has stayed just plain ‘Carrow Road’. There’s no danger of it moving out of town, either and it has good access and a few decent pubs around it. We might have had to replace a few stands over the last forty odd years I’ve been supporting but the general atmosphere and quality of the ground has remained.

The club’s history makes me so proud, too.  How amazing The Nest must have been with its precipitous terraces and crumbling bedrock, how I wish I’d seen some of that great Cup run in ’59 but also how I remember the thrill of all three of our Wembley appearances. Then there’s Keelan’s athleticism, Albert Bennett’s white boots, Trevor Hockey’s beard, MacDougall and Boyer, Martin Peters,  Fashanu’s goal against Liverpool, Gossy’s volleys, the great Mike Walker side leading the Premiership till Easter, the run in Europe, Iwan, Hucks and now The Horse!

Reasons to be cheerful? Yes, the good times are back and it makes me remember why Norwich City is our club. My club. The best club.