Iwan Roberts: No excuse for Norwich City players to be lacking fitness

The new Norwich boss said there was work to do – and if that is the case then I find it quite unbelievable. 

We’re in January. I know the lads had a four-week break for the World Cup, they had a week off and they went warm weather training in Tampa. By the sounds of it there wasn’t as much training as was needed. 

I have heard on numerous occasions from Norwich fans that they don’t look fit enough and in my opinion that is absolutely criminal. 

In this day and age with the facilities, the sport scientists, the analysts, the fitness coaches, for players not to be fit is really wrong. I have named people there who should be monitoring players’ fitness, but there is a responsibility on the players themselves. If they don’t think they are working hard enough in training they have to do more. 

As a player that is one thing you can monitor and look after. Some things in football go on around you and you have no control over them whatsoever, but your fitness as an individual... you can make sure that you are 100pc fit and if players up at Colney are not doing enough in training, if they aren’t ready to go when they need to, then questions should be asked.  

You have got to be careful because there is an unwritten rule between managers that you don’t go into a new job and criticise the fitness levels of the players, because really you are having a go at the previous manager. But they all do it, it doesn’t matter who you are, when a new manager takes over the first or second thing they say is ‘I’m going to have to get the players up to speed’.  

There are times when I think that is an excuse. When I have heard head coaches or managers say that in the past, I think they are trying to buy themselves a little bit of time just to get the ball rolling. But if fans are saying it on a weekly basis, that they don’t look fit enough, and by all accounts in the last few weeks in games, opposition players have looked stronger, fitter, quicker, so there must be an element of truth in it. 

How long before players can get up to speed? 

Well, you can’t flog the players for a week or two, because you have too many games. There are different ways now – when I was at Norwich we would probably be made to run around Colney a few times, just do running work. Nowadays you can just do it with the ball.  

But we are talking January, over halfway through the season. And players might not be fit enough? That is just not acceptable. 

Everything is on a plate for the players, they want for nothing – their nutrition is looked after, everything they need is there so there are no excuses. 

ON THE SIDE

I criticised Dean Smith for what I thought was a lack of something on the touchline, his charisma if you like. 

David Wagner is different: he’s lively and I like to see a passionate manager on the sidelines. Martin O’Neill was brilliant like that – he was here, there and everywhere. He was unbelievable, he wasn’t still for a minute, he would kick and head every ball, he was up and down the touchline, out of his technical area, getting warned by the officials. I like to see that and I think fans like to see it as well. You show you care, that is the biggest thing, and, no disrespect to Dean, but I didn’t see that. I look back to some of the games when he was manager at Villa and he was a little bit like it there, but Villa were his team. 

Fans like to see the passion and they will see it with David Wagner. 

David Wagner - a man who shows plenty of emotion on the touchline (Image: Paul Chesterton/Focus Images Ltd)

WAS I OTT?

The new era starts for real this weekend when David Wagner and Co head to Preston. 

There are plenty of games left and plenty of points to play for and I think that while automatic promotion has gone – I can’t see anyone catching Burnley or Sheffield United, who are by far the two most consistent teams in the division - I think City are more than capable of getting to the play-offs. 

I have thought about this a lot - I said in the past that I believed there was enough quality in that squad to get promoted again. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe I don’t believe it as much as I first thought, maybe I did go a bit OTT. 

Something has gone wrong somewhere for them to be in the position they are in now, but it only takes a couple of wins, especially with a new manager at the helm, for things to click back together. 

David Wagner has had more time to get his philosophy through to the players and the way he wants them to play and you will hope they have spent quite a lot of time up at Colney working on these things. 

I think there will be a greater understanding from the players of what the head coach expects of them, the way he wants them to play, their roles as individuals in the side and them as a collective unit, so absolutely they will have better ideas after seven or eight days working with him than they did going into the Blackburn game after just a couple of days. 

It will be interesting to see if he plays two up top, and who plays. Adam Idah has had some bad injuries and needs time in the team to get the best out of him and Wagner says he sees Josh Sargent as a central striker. Maybe he has to drop Teemu Pukki. 

Pukki is 32 years old, out of contract in the summer, one of the highest earners and hasn’t scored the number of goals in the Championship this season that he has done in the past – admittedly without the type of service Emi Buendia used to provide. 

Is it time to cash in on a player they have had great service from?