I wonder what my dad, Ricky, would have made of Norwich City’s current situation.

He certainly wouldn’t have lost faith, because he never did. When we first got our season tickets, we sat in the upper Barclay watching some of the worst football Carrow Road has ever seen as City slid into League One - but without fail, whatever the weather, we were always there.

Dad is always at the front of my mind at this time of year. It was on February 1, 2014 that he passed away, just over a month shy of his 70th birthday, six years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

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Anyone who has or has had a loved one with dementia will know how hard it is to watch them deteriorate. This was especially true for dad, who was an active man still kicking a ball around well into his 60s.

Even when his memory began to fail him, dad could still recall watching City from decades ago.

The 1959 FA Cup run was spoken of as if it was last week. Once described as a ‘Ronnie Corbett-sized dynamo’ by a newspaper, he scored many goals for Sunday League teams all over Norfolk and spoke of the time that someone knocked on the door of his parents’ house enquiring about his availability to join the ranks of Norwich City, only for his father to refuse and push him into an apprenticeship as a panel beater - a job he would end up doing for the next 40 years. It’s a lovely story and one that I really hope is true. Still, dad did get to play at East Anglia’s premier football grounds for the Norwich Boys.

My childhood memories are of dad pulling on his ‘lucky’ green jumper and heading off to Carrow Road.

I wasn’t bitten by the football bug until the age of nine, so back then I was rarely interested in who the Canaries were playing, even less so in going with him. It wasn’t until the day of the play-off final in 2002, when dad had left the house at some ungodly hour to travel to Cardiff, that my love of football began. Once City had lost on penalties to Birmingham and I was so distraught that I found myself sobbing into my pillow, I would never look back.

When we got our first season tickets together a few years later, going to the match was the thing dad and I did together. Those four years that we had before dad’s health prohibited him from visiting Carrow Road contain some of my fondest memories of my father.

There is nothing quite like the joy, the elation, the sheer outpouring of emotion that a last-minute winner provides. The Simeon Jackson goal in stoppage time against Derby on Easter Monday 2011, giving us a 3-2 win that put us on the verge of promotion to the Premier League, is a particular favourite. Dad and I were jumping up and down, completely out of control, and so was everyone else in the ground. It truly was one of the best days. I still sit in the same Barclay seat today.

My story is not unique, of course. Football is full of them. Families going together. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters. This is why it is far more than just a game. The fact that my dad could vividly remember watching Norwich City decades ago while struggling with dementia shows just how much it means to people.

Dad would never doubt for a second that Dean Smith and his squad could stay up this season.

I’m going to try to be more like him for the rest of the season. I’m going to cut out the negativity, back the team all the way, and you never know, they might just pull off the great escape.

Now, where is that green jumper?