All in all, it was a pretty infuriating afternoon, and had nothing to do with not playing particularly very well and getting a little bit battered.
Neither did it, to be fair, have anything to do with a Leeds home crowd that is again challenging for the crown of the country’s ‘most smug and self-important’.
We travelled to Elland Road on Sunday as the Championship’s best team over the previous three months: 32 points from 15 league matches, nine wins from 11, five away victories in the last six. Yet Paddy Power’s X admin decided to spend the afternoon treating us like a punchbag.
I guess they’re only doing their job and probably doing it well (I’m writing about it and have put their name in my headline, for god’s sake), but it was all so churlish and pointless. Ipswich supporters, of course, found it “f***ing hilarious”.
This was followed by TNT Sports’ commentary (for the record, and so you can give them a swerve in the future, their names were Adam Summerton and Lucy Ward), who did a more subtle hatchet job on our football club.
None of us were surprised. That’s the problem.
When admins go bad…
It started before kick-off. Paddy Power’s X account looked at the four FA Cup fifth-round ties on Sunday, saw that no “big” Premier League clubs were involved, and decided it was barely worth the effort.
Three games. Six sets of fans, all up for an FA Cup Sunday; all dismissed because none of them happened to be Arsenal or Liverpool. So, we were part of the joke before anyone had kicked a ball.
Their in-house tipster had already joined in on the fun, albeit inadvertently. Paddy Murphy, pushed a Bet Builder tip backed Dominic Calvert-Lewin to “make hay against the Canaries.”
Calvert-Lewin had not scored at Elland Road since December, which I guess was part of his premise, but wasn’t even in Farke’s squad.
After our tepid first-half performance, they doubled down on their Norwich-specific content. Obviously, it was all delivered in the name of ‘banter’, but no one from Norfolk was tickled.
Yes, I know, it was intended as a joke. But aren’t they supposed to be funny?
And then, with the match winding down, and the ‘admin’ clearly thoroughly bored with all things Norwich City, came their final salvo of the afternoon.
Great, eh? Our heroes, our club, reduced to a pretend inconvenience for a social media admin for whom we were the day’s Washington Generals (Google it, kids).
Of course, we’ll be told to lighten up and be asked, ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ but it’s all so tiring. It’s in the same envelope as the stuff previously dished up by those idiots at talkSPORT who despise us because we’re Norwich City and because we don’t always live up to their exacting standards.
(We’re looking at you Jason Cundy, Jamie O’Hara, and Matt Scott … we don’t forget.)
TNT’s commentators = no homework
Summerton and Ward had done as much homework for the game as I did for my GCSE Law when at college. Possibly less.
They spent the afternoon anchored to three reference points: Daniel Farke’s time at Norwich, our Premier League relegations, and our injury list (which they initially couldn’t be bothered to put a number to).
Farke, as we all know, “was promoted to the Premier League twice during his four years with Norwich but was never able to keep the Canaries in the top flight”. But there are only so many ways of putting it. It needed saying only once.
Both claimed to have watched City play recently, while making it abundantly clear that neither of them actually had.
As the game wore on, and as it became clear we were struggling to make it into the contest that TNT desired, they grew bored, frustrated even, and offered up the same ‘get me out of here’ tone as our Paddy Power friend.
Familiar pattern
Trouble is, we have been here before. Many times.
Every time we step onto a national stage, the same thing happens. The media defaults to a specific version of Norwich City,
Goodness knows what will happen if, god forbid, we were to get promoted, and they’d no longer be able to flog the Delia/food/let’s be having you tropes of yesteryear.
What I do know is the yo-yo tag would get dusted off, and O’Hara, Cundy and co will lose the will to live when being tasked with talking about us.
We didn’t expect to win yesterday, but thought we might have had a chance and, probably, that we would have tested Leeds more than we did. But what we didn’t deserve was to be perceived as a novelty act on a day trip to the North.
Paddy Power treated us as content fodder; TNT, without even meaning to, did the same.
We may be ‘little Norwich’, we’re pretty cool with that to be honest, but this doesn’t half get tiring.
