What next for Wagner and Webber's old guard?

06/16/2024 05:43 AM

It sounds ridiculous even saying it, but it’s not long until the new fixture list is released and pre-season training gets underway.

The players’ Colney return date hasn’t been formally announced. It will differ depending on the players’ summer commitments – Angus Gunn, Kenny McLean, and Grant Hanley, for example, will be given an extended break – but they normally report back for fitness tests in the last week of June.

What we know for certain is that the 2024-25 EFL fixtures are released at 9am on Wednesday 26th June. In just ten days. Then it starts to get real all over again.

Then on Saturday 10th August it really begins. Fifty-five days from today. When the jeopardy kicks, the nerves begin to shred, and the angst returns.

Not until it starts do you realise how calming the summer months can be.

We would not have it any other way but when seasons are as tumultuous as Norwich City’s tend to be at the moment, a few weeks to recharge the batteries are much-needed.

That’s not to say the period betwixt seasons is completely stress-free; not when you have a quite new sporting director and a very new head coach who have been tasked with assembling a new squad from the bones of one that most agreed was not of an ideal age or skill-set profile.

And it wasn’t just about its profile. It just wasn’t good enough either.

Ben Knapper and Johannes Hoff Thorup have made no secret of the future direction of travel.

The rebuild may well be assisted at some point by the sale of a Sara, a Nunez, a Rowe, or a Sargent, which should generate some funds for new additions to the squad, but there will also be a heavy focus on bringing through young players from the academy.

In our Robin’s excellent piece of midweek, he reels off six names – Abu Kamara, Brad Hills, Kellen Fisher, Jonathan Tomkinson, Emmanuel Adegboyega and Jaden Warner – all of whom look certain to feature in pre-season and be given the chance to stake a claim in the first-team squad if not the starting XI.

Context is needed, of course, in that four of those six are centre-backs and our single signing so far has been a left-sided centre-back. Given that Jose Cordoba looks like a nailed-on starter if fit, then one doesn’t need to be a mathematician to understand that four into one doesn’t go.

And then there’s what’s known as the Grant Hanley/Shane Duffy factor – both of whom still have at least a year left on their current deals and who will not be expecting to spend time on the bench playing second-fiddle to a late-teen or early-twenty-something.

There will obviously be a need for some experienced heads in a squad that will have a much lower average age, and it may be that JHT will opt for one of those two to be an ‘older head’, but if we start the season with one or both (don’t even think about it Johannes) at centre-back, I’m not sure the rebuild will have gone in the direction most of us envisage.

For all of Hanley’s and Duffy’s undoubted qualities – I can’t be alone in feeling exasperated at the “slow/lumbering” insinuations thrown at Hanley who, when fit, is one of the quickest players at the club – neither is especially comfortable with the ball at their feet.

Yet in most teams, the modern-day centre-back has to be. So too the centre-backs in a team managed by Thorup if YouTube clips of his Nordsjælland team are anything to go by. Indeed, it was Cordoba’s quality on the ball and cultured left foot that made him Knapper’s first summer target.

Quite where that leaves Hanley and Duffy I’m not sure, other than armed with a big old contract that the club is duty bound to pay for its duration.

At the other end of the pitch, we have one Ashley Barnes who finds himself in a similar situation. The 34-year-old has another year left on his City deal but, with the best will in the world, isn’t of a profile that naturally lends itself to the Thorup project.

And, aside from anything else, he didn’t play very well last season. Yes, he was a unit who put himself about, who got the referee’s ear, who wound up a few centre-backs, and provided a decent foil for Josh Sargent, but come on…

If we’re being honest with ourselves, he offered us no more than you’d expect of a 34-year-old who has plenty of nous but whose legs carry him around the pitch with limited effect.

I understand that he’s the ultimate professional and was an excellent influence on the younger players but, as with the two veteran centre-backs, if he’s in the starting XI on 10th August ahead of, say, Abu Kamara and/or Ken Aboh, then the project will have taken an unexpected turn.

I also understand it’s impossible to simply jettison older players just because they no longer fit the profile, nor is it sensible to dispense with the services of every experienced player in the squad – we know how that ends – but the name of this new game is to energise the squad with some young legs and minds.

As things stand, it’s too early to even hazard a guess at what said XI will look like but I’m expecting (and hoping) that there’ll be no Dad’s Army ‘jokes’ hurled in our direction.

In the meantime …. C’MON England.