Why I have faith in 'The Special One' 9th JANUARY 2010

WHY I HAVE FAITH IN ‘THE SPECIAL ONE’.

What a week for us Norwich City supporters!  As if it wasn’t bad enough freezing at Adams Park last weekend  to the point where one thought one might lose various extremities we’ve had to face up to the disclosure of a massive debt and the possibility, thankfully now removed, it seems, of losing our Special One. Having waited several miserable years for St. Paul’s arrival at Carrow Road it was a seriously disturbing prospect to consider losing him to a minor Northern club (albeit one with a decent history) with about 2,000 supporters. Seriously I was worried and slept only fitfully on Wednesday and Thursday nights. I kept having nightmares in which St. Paul went to Turf Moor and took David McNally with him leaving a hapless board to appoint Gary Megson for a third stint in charge, with McNally’s replacement, Allen Stanford, releasing a ’third time lucky’ statement to the media with Delia sitting on his lap!  In one particularly horrendous vision we went to Colchester and lost 8-1 with Theoklitos at centre-forward (where he played considerably better than he did in the opening game of the season) and Megson brought himself on as a substitute, leaving Holt, Martin, Hoolahan  and Russell on the bench.

It was with massive relief, then, that I watched Friday’s Press Conference when St. Paul, flanked by new signings Whitbread and Johnson, said he was staying to finish the job. All was well with the world again and that feeling was reinforced by the home win over Exeter. Suddenly the cold didn’t seem to matter any more as the goal machine that is our front two slipped back into gear. The Horse impressed me particularly not only with two clinical finishes but also with the brilliant pull back for Chrissy Martin’s goal.

I think we have to face up to the fact that the Walsall game will have to be rearranged again but at least that gives us a full week to prepare for what seems to have become the biggest grudge match since England met Argentina for the first time after The Falklands War. Just what planet Colchester chairman Robbie Cowling actually comes from is beyond my comprehension. His inflammatory comments in advance of this game, his attitude towards our ticket allocation and his small-minded attempts to get points docked from our total speak of a very bitter and twisted attitude indeed. His disappointment at losing St. Paul to a bigger club is understandable but that’s football – we all know it and all clubs have to accept it. We have lost managers in the past, we’ve had to face up to losing our best players many times and though there are always occasional rankles I cannot ever remember our club reacting with such obvious bitterness. When you are a club the size of Colchester you surely have to accept that players and managers, if successful, will move on to better themselves and if Cowling doesn’t realise that Lambert has moved up in the world in more ways than one by swapping Essex for Norfolk then he really must be from outer space. He might well look back on this whole business one day and realise that he has behaved with about as much class as a Robin Reliant.

Listening to Canary Call this week worried me slightly; several callers seemed disgruntled that we had allowed Exeter back into the game. It struck me that there is a danger that we are doing so well that people are forgetting that the opposition are allowed to play as well. We cannot just win every game at a canter – opposition teams will not just roll over and die. Even if they are not table-topping sides and even if they are in League One they are often well-organised, professional and difficult to break down. The fact that we have won ten home games says it all. And just imagine how the Leeds fans felt as Wycombe outplayed them (Beckford and all) on their own patch.

Four new signings might seem strange for a club with our financial worries but I have faith in McNally and The Special One. I am confident that there is a plan in place and that all wages, agents’ fees and any other incidental expenses involved are within a well-prepared budget which, I suspect, is what might have been lacking when Glenn (certainly not special) Roeder was busy borrowing players from Premier League reserve teams a short while ago. It breaks my heart to think of the agents of the likes of Troy Archibald-Useless and OJ Couldn’t Finish A Packet Of Crisps getting together to discuss how much money they had just been given by Roeder. That said I suspect we might have to shed some players in the near future which brings me to Jamie Cureton. Sadly, during a pretty prolific goalscoring career Jamie played his best football for other clubs even though his heart has always been at Carrow Road (and, more specifically, I think, in The Barclay!) I will never forget him dying his hair for the derby game when he was a youngster and the fact that his second spell in the yellow and green hasn’t produced a goal-fest just shows that in football fairy tales rarely happen.