The end of an era?

Tomorrow afternoon, Norwich City face Burnley in front of SKY's TV cameras at Carrow Road. It's fair to say that my beloved Canaries have been enduring a pretty sorry time of it of late: favourites to be promoted straight back to the Premiership at the start of last season, an absolutely appalling campaign of miserable, directionless football, poor signings, and excuses from both Delia Smith's board and the manager, Nigel Worthington, followed. Things got so bad that, on two or three occasions, Worthington was probably only a game from the sack: leading to the bizarre sight of Norwich fans actually cheering QPR goals at Carrow Road back in April. Defeat then might well have meant the end of Worthington, and a desperately-needed fresh start; instead, we scrambled through, the hapless manager survived, and on we drifted, to where we find ourselves now.

This season began encouragingly - but has already foundered on the twin rocks of our desperately thin squad (a pretty remarkable state of affairs for a club which received at least £15m to £20m of Premiership money in 2004/5), and our absolutely shocking away form - which now reads, get this, a disgraceful six wins from our last 47 games on the road. So shambolic was our display at Plymouth last weekend that even Delia - a woman who could never be accused of a knee-jerk reaction - was moved to issue a statement on Monday, in which she and her husband (and fellow joint majority shareholder, Michael Wynn Jones) bemoaned the "lack of passion and commitment" of the team at Home Park, and demanded that the situation "be rectified in our next home game on Sunday, and in our next away game" (at QPR in a fortnight).

But the trouble is, no-one quite knows what this means: what happens if City play poorly in both games, but scramble two undeserved victories? Or alternatively, what will be the consequences if we do at last play with real passion, but are unlucky in either or both matches? For myself, my take on it is that this statement is the beginning of the long-overdue end game: the board have been slowly distancing themselves from Worthington for some time now, stating to a meeting of supporters before the season began that he was "on borrowed time", and palpably failing to back him during the August transfer window. But if they sack him, he'll be entitled to considerable compensation; so they're hoping he'll jump instead, and are trying to engineer such an outcome: we might indeed regard it as tantamount to 'constructive dismissal'.

It's desperately, desperately sad that it has come to this. When Worthington took over, Norwich had been gradually shrinking as a club and drifting towards a hitherto undreamt of status in English football's third tier for several years. With the help of some real money being made available at last, he initially transformed us, taking us first to the play-off final, and then to the title, and with it, promotion to the promised land two years later. But there, things began to go wrong: he bizarrely chose to release the club's talismanic skipper, Malky Mackay, reasoning he wasn't good enough for the highest level (yes, that's the same Malky Mackay who we're seeing every week on our television screens strutting his stuff for Watford in, you guessed it, the Premiership): meaning that the team lacked both leadership, and just as importantly, height too. We failed to sign the top-class striker we urgently required until January, after a first half of the season peppered with good performances, but draws which should have been wins; and then began to leak goals alarmingly too.

Even then, we could still have escaped. But all season long, the club patronised itself with a ridiculous, embarassing, "we're just happy to be here" mindset: and this reached its nadir on the season's final day at Fulham, when with our fate in our own hands, playing a team with nothing to motivate itself but pride, and with neutrals across the country cheering us on, we proceeded to be humiliated, 6-0. And I honestly don't believe the club has recovered since: that annihilation at Craven Cottage is like the most monumental hangover which just will not go away.

So we started poorly last season, and were flirting with relegation by the early winter. At this stage, any Championship club with a modicum of ambition - and especially one which had just been relegated, and with only two years of parachute payments to help it return to the top flight - would have turned to the manager, said thanks for the memories, and moved on. But not us: not cuddly, inoffensive little Norwich. Never at any stage did we look like recovering: players were just hoofing it long, and the manager was a shadow of the man who had arrived with such a refreshingly tough, positive attitude all those years before. He was past his sell-by date, and the team had gone stale - yet still, the board refused to act.

It beggars belief that, in circumstances whereby we'll inevitably release our best players should we fail to go back up this season, the board have dithered to such a degree: and is symptomatic of a club which wallows in its perenially 'nice' image, in a football world in which - as in life - you have to fight tooth and nail in order to achieve what you want. Thanks to the board's inertia, Worthington has gone from being successful and hugely popular to a widely reviled figure - and Delia and her inept leadership have presided over a depressing ebbing away of the goodwill and trust which she and the club had worked so hard to build up. Carrow Road is a poisonous place to be at the moment - but that's down to the board, not us. Whisper it, but sometimes, the club behaves in such a craven, backwards kind of way that it simply does not deserve the passion and devotion of its supporters: supporters who, incidentally, continue to provide the largest average attendances in the Championship, despite the drivel the team continually serves up.

My best guess about tomorrow is the players - who have plainly lost faith in Worthington, and need a change as much as anyone - will effectively down tools; and that Burnley, who will be looking to perform in order to persuade their excellent manager, Steve Cotterill, not to join a bigger club he's been linked with such as West Brom, will do a job on us. Meaning, after almost six years, exit Worthington - but really, it needn't have come to this. One can only hope the board has learnt from the shocking inadequacies of the past year: otherwise, the road back to the Premiership could be long indeed.