It is an indictment of how this season has gone that I was actually rather pleased that Norwich City weren’t playing at the weekend. No defeat to digest, no poor performance to lament.

Since my dad passed away eight years ago, I have sat alone in the Barclay end, no one to chat to at half time, so my entire experience of a Carrow Road matchday is based on the football. If the football is bad, then my day has been bad. This season my days have been really bad.

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Let’s not try to kid ourselves with false optimism. Norwich are going to be relegated, and it’s a question of when rather than if.

It no longer feels like a tragedy, as it did for me as a 12-year-old in 2005. Back then it meant not getting to play Fergie’s Manchester United and not seeing my favourite team on Match of the Day.

Now, being back in the Championship means we might go into the majority of games with at least the possibility (but by no means the likelihood, it’s not a league to be taken lightly) of winning them and we might not have so many games moved to 3am on a Thursday for the benefit of a television audience in Indonesia.

We’ve been through this too often now for it to really hurt any more. Rather, we sigh with disappointment at another opportunity missed. Another chance to crack the Premier League gone, when it feels like nearly everyone else makes a better fist of it than us.

My Leeds-supporting friend has spent most of the season worrying about relegation. Last year was his team’s first in the top division for 16 years, so it still maintains the novelty factor for him. He’s desperate to stay there. I keep telling him they’re going to be fine, but he built up the recent meeting between our two sides as a massive occasion and when Leeds won it even after Kenny McLean thought he’d stolen a point in stoppage time, he seemed to be a tad wary of how I would react.

Truth is, like most Norwich fans, I’m used to losing Premier League games. It came as no surprise to me that we’d found a new way to lose. It was a shrug rather than a scream.

I think, for a club like Leeds, staying up could open doors for them. They’ve got the money to make improvements to their squad, to bring in high class performers lured by the Premier League status.

Going down would be a huge setback for them. For Norwich, we know that nothing will change until we receive significant outside investment. We can’t afford the players that might turn us into an established top flight club and if we go down we’ll most likely be back in a year or two to go through it all again.

We might as well look towards the summer. How much of the squad should we keep? Tim Krul and Teemu Pukki are musts. Are we likely to be able to get a decent fee for Max Aarons now? That ship might have sailed, his star has waned and the consensus is that Sam Byram is a superior defender. Will 2022-23 be the season of Jon Rowe? He has showed glimpses of promise in his brief first team appearances to date. There are so many questions to be answered.

In my opinion it’s the most crucial summer for the club since 2009, when David McNally set about stabilising the finances and plotting a route out of League One.

Get it right and this time next year we could well be pontificating about how to tackle the Premier League once more. Get it wrong and it could be a prolonged absence this time, raising the prospect of a dreary and, dare I say it, Ipswich-like spell as second division also-rans.