Luton Town, Review (a)

Daft little ground, silly game, fuck off.

Ugh alright then. Here’s the proper review.

Positives

Everyone else around us conspired to fuck up and we’re still top of the league. We’re also having the injury crisis after having got there in the first place. Things really would be grim right now if we were, say, down in 12th or something.

Midweek moan

Can I just shock you? I think having no striker makes it really difficult to score goals in football matches. Yeah, I know! Crazy right? Watching Norwich right now reminds me of that old school video I think we all watched called the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, but it’s all in reverse. Take the string section away from an orchestra playing Mozart’s Serenade No.13 in G Major and it sounds like dogshit.

But, thankfully, this problem looks like it might be sorted pretty quickly. A bigger worry right now is Krul being injured for a good few weeks as McGovern (someone who I have stuck up for in the past) looks like his confidence has been shot to pieces and can’t even make the most basic of pass. I speculated on the ACN WhatsApp chat that perhaps we could genuinely employ a normal outfield libero-style sweeper (as it seemed a few times that McGovern was tapping the ball to a centre back to then play the pass that Krul would have played anyway), but Eternal Supreme Leader Punt correctly suggested that you need Ian Culverhouse to do that properly, and I’m not sure if King’s Lynn are willing to let us borrow him…

Oh, and The Championship is the 11th most attended sports league in the world by average attendance. That’s the 11th most attended over EVERY sport in the WORLD. And yet, here I am watching a broadcast of my team’s match on a subscription channel with the world’s shittest camera angle, no replays, an uninterested commentator and a picture quality that looked like someone had smeared Vaseline on the camera lens. Can you imagine how quickly UFC, boxing, Formula One, snooker or every other sport that relies on an entertained TV audience (rather than the loyalty of supporters) would die a death if they had such a crap broadcasting service? If the Football League cannot even do the basics like this for the people who pay their bills (the TV/web subscriber), then they are going to find themselves with a problem very quickly during this time where full crowds are still not going to be back for a while yet. And no amount of name changes or corporate rebranding will fix that.

Moment of the match

I made the mistake of looking away from the screen for five seconds and completely missed the second Luton goal, and with no replay service I still have no idea how it was scored. I am assuming it was like Marco van Basten in 1988? Anyway. This goal was critical with regards to the fact we couldn’t make one of our classic comebacks without a striker, and Luton nullified the game in the second half.

Farke Watch

Hmm. Throwing the youth striker on with only five minutes to go when 3-1 down seems like a bizarre decision no matter how you frame it. His hand has been forced with pretty much every other difficult decision he has to make, but this was a weird one. You could say he is worried about exposing the yoof to a difficult situation in a game that we clearly made the decison to sack off any move on from midway in the second half (lest we risk further injuries or suspensions), but he has thrown players into the fire before (e.g. Max Aarons’ debut was against Ipswich). I’d like to pick his brains over that decision.

Random Star

Oh christ. Thinking of an answer to this section kept me up half the night. Emi was the only one who really had anything around an average game. Everyone else was poor for me, Clive.

Summary

Classic annoying little bastard of an away game that Norwich occasionally go and lose even when things are going well. (We all have our first memory of these. Mine is losing 1-0 at Selhurst Park in 2004 when we took over 5,000 fans. If that game didn’t sum up being a Norwich fan then I don’t know what does). Nothing of great long term concern, and more of a loss as a result of circumstance than anything else – even if no one played particaurly very well.

Let’s move on to Saturday where I AM GOING TO THE GAME IN ACTUAL PERSON, so the review is going to be actually from SOMEONE AT THE GAME! The first one on this site since 7 March. Nine whole months. What a time to be alive.