Norwich City are rare bright spot in this dreary Championship season

[ASFN Admin]

This season’s Championship has a quality problem. In any sane re-imagining of football the second tier would be to the Premier League what American college football is to the NFL, a fun younger brother, a looser form of the game which some prefer watching despite its inferior quality. This season it has been mostly formless slop. A punishing schedule of games between mediocre teams on eroding pitches played to an audience of plastic seats. Watching it has felt like a chore. The numbers support what your eyes will have told you if you’ve sat through a handful of games. Before this weekend, the average Championship game featured 22.2 shots, with 7.2 on target. In the four previous seasons those averages were 25.2 and 8.2 respectively. Goals per game stood at 2.67 last season, this year it’s down to 2.24. Passing stats are down too, and while the Premier League is showing a similar decline in some areas the downturn is nothing like as significant, so it’s not just a lack of crowds making the Championship feel flat. Norwich City are a rare bright spot in a dreary league. Not the division’s highest scorers (Brentford) nor its meanest defence (Swansea) but unarguably its best team. An immediate return to the top tier beckons and it will be grinding wins like Sunday’s 2-0 against Wycombe which get them there. This was top vs bottom but you wouldn’t have known it in the first half, with Gareth Ainsworth’s well-drilled side content to camp in their own half, diminutive Dominic Gape a willing presence in defensive midfield and Norwich limited mostly to harmless deep crosses. Wycombe played it perfectly and were unfortunate not to get anything from two shouts for debatable tackles on Anis Mehmeti close to the box. Norwich’s quality arrived with little fanfare after the break. Full-backs pushed higher creating overloads on both flanks and Emi Buendia consistently twisted away from defenders. His cross was converted, via deflection, by Teemu Pukki for the opening goal, and the 10 minutes which followed suggested a game as fun as the unseasonably bright weather that had broken out.

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