The play-offs are now close enough to touch for Norwich City, and the season most fans wanted to finish back in November, looks like it will be going into extra time.
One last game to get through and one last hurdle for Norwich to clear and a trip to a team battling against relegation isn’t usually the best way to finish a season.
However, all things being well, Norwich will secure that play-off place and set themselves up for a tough semi-final regardless of where they finish. The prospect of two games against Leeds, Southampton or the team from Suffolk will be stern tests for David Wagner and Norwich will need to up their game from some rather mixed performances in recent weeks.
Whoever they face, having the home leg first will almost certain benefit Norwich given their strong form at Carrow Road over the last few months. While you cannot win the semi-final in the first game, you can certainly lose it. When Wagner won the play-offs with Huddersfield he did so with only scoring one goal across the three games, I wouldn’t be surprised if he approaches them again in the same fashion (should Norwich make it there), knowing that knockout football is often won by the team with the best defence.
It seems though with or without a change in league this season there will be significant changes at the club. With Mark Attanasio and his group being given the green light from the EFL, Norwich will go into the summer with a new power structure for the first time since Delia and Michael took control in 1996.
From where we stand now, it is hard to really get a good idea of how much this new joint owner is really going to impact things in the short term.
Much of the talk is of backroom improvements, especially around analytics and data. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who follows baseball given the data revolution that was seen with great impact across the sport.
But should Norwich fail to go up this season, will the new investors be happy to see a talented team get ripped apart with major transfers?
The longer it takes to get promoted back to Premier League the harder it gets. Players such as Gabriel Sara and Marcelino Nunez came to Norwich as it projected itself as a club striving to go back up. Lose that image and recruiting replacements for these types of players gets harder and harder.
I look to Norwich’s future with equal amounts of trepidation and excitement. There is an unfair stereotype of Norfolk of being somewhere ‘we fear change’. Hopefully there is no reason to fear Norwich’s boardroom changes.
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