Apathy in NR1

Last week I wrote about the issues at Carrow Road and the worries I have in relation to how the club is run.

Since then, Norwich played at the weekend and lost to Hull, despite being 0-0 at half time and dominating the first half. The same old story of the team coming out in the second, conceding early and never look like scoring themselves, before a second was rolled in near the end.

Norwich have now lost all seven home games this season. Six in the league and one in the League Cup, and so to be the first club in 35 years to have a home record in the second tier that reads: LLLLLL.

So far, so bad.

Many were expecting the manager, Liam Manning to be fired soon after, but from the club there was silence.

The club is drifting, there appears to be a defective management structure at the club, with no CEO to decide on direction and performance indicators. Fpr me as a management system auditor, or former one, this lack of structure and poor decision making is very worrying. As the same defective decision making process made by the same people will pass judgement on Manning and any possible successor.

If they got the appointment of Johannes Hoff Thorup wrong. I mean they sacked him after ten months. And apparently the appointment of Liam Manning hasn't brought the improvments expected, unless the club is using some performance indicator far removed from the league position (next to bottom) or points won (8) in thirteen games.

I can remember games at Carrow Road with barely ten thousand fans in attendance, going to away games where barely one full coach run by Club Canary arrived. A remarkable change at the club's centenary in 2002 meant that fas began to return, or came for the first time, and the ground began to fill.

Promotions in 2004, 2010, 2015 and 2019 only increased demand. Even relagation to League 1 didn't deminish demand for tickets, as you would have thought.

In 2019, more seats were fitted where there was room, not with the best views, but the club was doing something.

But what we see now are empty seats. Empty seats in all stands, and in parts of the City Stand, areas where twenty or thirty seats in a group were unfilled as on Saturday.

The now paused plan to move the away fans alienated many fans, not just those 3,000 season ticket holders who were affected, but by all fans, as they could be next.

Trust in the club and management took Delia and Michael the best part of two decades to build, and that has been lost in a matter of weeks by Zoe Webber and Ben Knapper​ who apparently report to no one except Mark Attanasio, the majority shareholder who visited the city for three days last week.

With so many empty seats, and some season ticket holders now saying they're not going to renew next season, the club is caught in a downward spiral, with no clear way out of it. Fans now have been treated poorly for several years, bad for compounded with apathy is a toxic mix for the club.

One way out would be to have a winning team. Nothing brings a club, a team and fans togoether like winning lots of football matched. But who can see that happening?

We wait the club's next move, and how "sensible" or considered it is.