"Get a reputation as an early riser, and you can stay in bed til noon..."

... Or so the saying goes. And it probably applies more to Norwich City than most other clubs. Fans like myself might complain about the way the club patronises itself as cuddly, little Norwich - but for as long as I can remember, the Canaries have had a reputation as a well run, family club based on good husbandry, which believes first and foremost in playing attractive football on the ground. Even when the complete opposite of this was true in the frightening final months under Robert Chase, or under the dreary negativity of John Deehan, Gary Megson, and in parts of Rioch and Worthington's reigns too, the cliche still seemed to apply whenever national journalists deigned to cover the latest events at Carrow Road.

The question is, though, are we really that 'well run'? Goodness knows, however frustrating our constant selling off of our best players was in the early 1990s, pretty much all of us at least assumed that the future was safe under Chase's apparently cautious, conservative leadership - but, as I'm sure we'd all now agree, just how wrong can you be? And whenever other smaller clubs have been equally lauded for punching above their weight - Burley's Ipswich, or O'Neill's Leicester, for example - as soon as things on the pitch began to go wrong, a very different and deeply alarming reality was revealed, with the very survival of both clubs suddenly in real question.

Having seen my club come within literally a couple of days of closure, I'll always be wary of assuming all is well behind the scenes. And there is a rather different, revisionist way of explaining our success between 2001 and 2004 - which also throws some light onto the questions of first, why did it take the board so long to finally wake up, smell the coffee and dismiss Worthington; and second, why has so little money been spent in strengthening what is now an alarmingly thin squad since relegation?

I studied at UEA between 1997 and 2000: three deeply dispiriting years to be a Canaries fan. Back then, as the club struggled to rebuild after the chaos of the Chase era, all the talk was of its mounting debts, inability to sign new players, and a break-even figure of 16,000 attendances which, amazing as it might seem now, we weren't even close to achieving. As Rioch departed with City marooned in mid-table, and things immediately became even worse under Hamilton, the club seemed to be shrinking: outspent by clubs it had left in its wake for most of the preceding decade, and caught in a slow spiral downwards which seemed destined to end with us back, after more than 40 years away, in English football's third flight.

Moreover, such had been the fiasco of Hamilton's ill-starred spell, and the absurd way in which the board backed him, and blamed the local press for forcing him out, the supporters' faith in Delia and co was at an all-time low. Add to this the fact that Ipswich were enjoying their best season in decades in the Premiership, and something clearly had to give: the board needed to get it right, or else. Into this breach stepped Worthington: who immediately stood up to the board, forcing them to back him when they still appeared to be hedging their bets over whether to give him the job permanently, and even more significantly, insisting they release substantial funds to strengthen the team too.

Of course, this was also at precisely the point that the Football League had secured a lucrative deal with ITV Digital, leading to many clubs spending money up front before they were actually due to receive it: which probably explains how, in Spring and Summer 2001, highly encouraging acquisitions such as Adam Drury, Gary Holt, Mark Rivers, Clint Easton and Marc Libbra came to arrive at Carrow Road. Thanks to a combination of past failure, a desperate need to get the fans back on board, and the ITV Digital money, the club's strategy had palpably changed.

No longer were we merely cutting our (rather thin) cloth to suit our (depressingly meagre) means. The board had concluded that, after getting it so wrong with Hamilton, it had to gamble on Worthington getting it right: and I suspect it was a considerably greater gamble than most realised at the time. So while City's arrival in the play-offs in May 2002 was a pleasant surprise to most observers, it probably represented a minimum expectation on the part of the board, which was now gambling that promotion could sort out most of our continued underlying financial problems. But it only had a limited window - say, three years - in which to achieve this: otherwise, the better players would have to be released, and we'd not only be back to square one, but in a worse financial state than ever. And moreover, the disastrous collapse of ITV Digital in Summer 2002 made the need to succeed within this window even more urgent.

In my view, this explains why the club were - contrary to the expectations of so many fans - prepared to fork out the money to sign first Huckerby, Crouch and Harper on loan; and subsequently to buy Huckerby and McKenzie. Without the loan signings, we wouldn't have even been in contention to go up - and buying Hux and Leon turned possible promotion into probable promotion. And given they were now in their third and final year of the window I've identified, the board's attitude was effectively one of "in for a penny, in for a pound": they had to secure promotion in 2003/4, for the consequences of failure would set the club back many years.

Yet this whole strategy was, in essence, based on using the money earned from a year in the Premiership to stabilise things - but I don't think it was ever to really transform Norwich into an established top-flight club. Of course, it was hoped that we could survive, and gradually build: just as Charlton and Bolton had before us. More money would surely have been used to strengthen the team had we somehow scrambled to safety in 2005 - but we never really expected to do so. Resources remained tight: meaning relatively limited amounts were spent following promotion in Summer 2004, and popular players such as Malky Mackay were released. And it also meant that, when we were relegated, we simply didn't have the means to use our parachute payments in creating a side that would, as so many City fans anticipated, bounce straight back up: in fact, with debts increasing, we needed to hold the payments back for a rainy day: not least to pay off a certain manager's contract should things go pear-shaped...

So here we find ourselves now: once again budgeting for a mere mid-table finish in the Championship, and with what remains a very good first XI, but pathetically little cover. And we can't budget for anything more - because the gamble of the earlier part of the decade was in order to buy time, and certainly won't be repeated at any point in the foreseeable future.

I guess the thrust of my whole (immensely long and rambling: for which my apologies) piece is this: Norwich's success was built on sand. At no point did we substantially reduce our debts: in fact, they've more than doubled since the turn of the decade. And far from being a club which somehow mustered its resources in a brilliant, clever way in order to over-achieve in 2003/4, in fact, we'd speculated to accumulate, and simply had to go up that year, or else. Certainly, what Delia has done in using her catering expertise to bring in much-needed resources has been terrific; and to be sure, she, Neil Doncaster and especially Nigel Worthington all deserve a huge pat on the back for increasing our gates by more than 50% since the dire days of the late '90s.

But we're not so much an example of a superbly run club as one that, quite simply, spent money in order to succeed - and now, back in the Championship, and having just given our ex-manager a substantial pay-off (the avoidance of which was surely the main factor behind the board dragging its feet for so long over the past year), we just don't have the will or the wherewithal to spend similar amounts again. Whoever takes over as the new manager should be warned: City are pretty much back where we started, and - barring him emulating Iain Dowie's miraculous transformation of Crystal Palace three years ago - it could be a number of years before we're in a position to return to the top flight.