on the ball city

how seeing norwich lose to liverpool left me feeling like i could cry tears of happiness

On Saturday, I went to the football. It’s one of the weirdest parts of the pandemic that this isn’t an utterly ordinary way to describe my weekend activities: across my entire life, I don’t think there’s anything other than basic life functions that I’ve done with more regularity on Saturday afternoons than going to Carrow Road to watch Norwich play. Yet Norwich’s season opener against Liverpool was my first proper Saturday game in well over a year and a half, and I could barely believe how much I’d missed it and how good it was to be back. 

It’s not like it’s always a purely joyous time, at least in terms of the results: there was a certain crushing inevitability to Liverpool beating us 3-0 after a shitty, virus-interrupted pre-season, and a large chunk of the period in which I’ve been going to matches has been pretty fucking depressing. Some dickheads go to Norwich matches, too: against Liverpool, we still heard the old ‘sign on’ chants, though pleasantly few people joined in. And I love it anyway, because it’s about more than just individuals: the journey to the stadium, the little rituals we’ve developed over decades, the matches themselves, the atmosphere and the chants, and of course the team.

The thing with football is that, although in any objective account it sincerely and truly does not matter, it really feels like it does, especially when you’re in the stadium. I’ve sat — mostly stood — in the Barclay end, where the noise and chanting comes from in Carrow Road, for as long as I’ve been going. Before every match the entire ground breaks into ‘On the Ball City,’ the oldest football chant in the world. Really it’s an absurd song — it features the total non-word ‘scrimmage’ — but you sing it every time, in unison with all twenty thousand Norwich fans in the stadium. 

When we broke into it on Saturday, it really brought home how much the football experience for me is about ritual and tradition and community. You feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, part of these rhythms and habits and hopes and beliefs which are shared between tens of thousands of people. The closest analogy I can think of is to canvassing in the run-up to the 2019 election. I travelled around the country, ran through the pouring rain, debated policies with people I barely knew, but with whom I had something absolutely essential in common: caring about the same thing, moving in the same direction. That’s a feeling I treasure wherever I can find it.

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I started going to matches in the latter part of the 2005/06 season, the year after we’d been relegated from the Premiership. I was, in retrospect, extremely young to be going to matches, but all my memories are extraordinarily fond. I was borrowing my older brother’s season ticket because he was travelling, and was going to games with his dad and one of his friends. I was seven at my first match, and I’d get my own season ticket the season after, when I was eight. I swore precociously. We’d stop at a couple pubs on the walk to the ground, and I’d drink my body weight in diet coke, with the obvious consequences for my bladder. I used to stand on the fold-out seat so I could see the pitch. They were good times.

Though not, really, for Norwich. The club had been building towards the Premiership for years until we were eventually promoted in 2004, but once we went up, we dropped straight back down, and I got front-row seats as Norwich just kept falling. We had a succession of disappointing managers, of whom the worst was probably Peter Grant but for whom the most animosity was probably held for the late Glenn Roeder, partly because he didn’t renew the contract of aging star player Darren Huckerby. Huckerby was legendary among Norwich fans, and remains the subject of the greatest football chant of all time, ‘The Twelve Days of Huckerby’. (It’s a festive song like its more mainstream cousin, but instead of partridges and rings and such things you get 364 Darrens Huckerby.) Axing him might have been the right decision in terms of wages and squad composition, but it was not popular.

Yet at the same time, my family were starting to build up some of the traditions which have defined supporting Norwich for me. My dad started coming to matches for the 2007/08 season, which changed some of the routine a bit from what it had been since before I’d been going to matches. I remember that around the time that Roeder was first appointed, we bought a pack of pistachios from the Tesco on our route home and, in lieu of anything sensible to do with the shells — I guess other than ‘putting them in bins’, but who’s got the time? — we made a game out of putting them in weird places. One, which stayed there for a surprisingly long period of time, was somehow wedged into the back of a sign about parking permits. Norwich then embarked on a thirteen-match unbeaten streak which pretty much secured our until-then tenuous safety in the league. Obviously we decided that pistachio shells were lucky.

The nadir for Norwich, meanwhile, was our relegation to League One in 2009, making the 2009/10 season our first spell in the third tier of English football in exactly fifty years. More precisely, the low point was our first match of that season. Our manager was club legend Bryan Gunn, who was in no sense good but, in his few matches at the end of our relegation season, had us at least playing some fun football. We’d signed some players who certainly seemed exciting. Surely we’d demolish Colchester at home, I thought, stupidly. We didn’t. 

We lost 7-1, and I literally cried. 

In writing this, I went back and watched the highlights, and it’s still upsetting. I thought the moment my heart broke came later in the match — maybe Colchester’s third or fourth goal — but it’s actually their first: right-back Jon Otsemebor inexplicably chips a backpass to new goalkeeper Michael Theoklitos; it bounces in front of him, and he manages inexplicably to position himself directly underneath the highest point of its arc; he flails pathetically but can’t punch it away as it loops over his head; a Colchester player gets an easy tap-in, but takes an unnecessary touch beforehand just to rub salt in the wound.

I could be telling you this so you understand how much suffering I’ve been caused by Norwich City Football Club over the years, but that’s not really it: it’s to say that even after that misery, I never even imagined not turning up to the next match, and to say that sometimes football offers us these perfect little narrative moments. The Colchester game was as perfect a calamity as you could script for the club; obviously, from there, the only way was up.

I’d call what comes next a hero’s journey, but realistically we’re the villains here: Norwich responded to this embarrassment by sacking Gunn and basically stealing Colchester’s manager, Paul Lambert. The next few seasons were my first taste of sustained joy as a Norwich fan, though, as Lambert built a ruthless, shithousing team around Wes Hoolahan, a diminutive Irish version of Messi who’s my favourite ever footballer, and Grant Holt, a pretty conventional target-man powered, as best I can tell, by sheer spite. I don’t think anyone has ever enjoyed anything as much as Grant Holt enjoyed taunting Ipswich fans after scoring against them, which he did a lot.

Under Lambert, we went to Colchester and beat them 5-0 as our season was transformed — we ended up as champions, having overcome a huge points deficit to catch up with Leeds, whose best players we promptly stole. The next season, we beat our rivals, Ipswich, by a combined score of 9-2 as we got promoted from the Championship the very next season. We finished twelfth in the Premier League, securing survival despite our squad being terrible beyond Holt and Hoolahan and Lambert having not really heard of ‘defending’ at that point. It was all just absurdly fun for all involved — we were so clearly punching above our weight, and the team was full of players who gave their all in every match and never stopped running. We loved them all. 

Then Lambert abandoned us for Aston Villa and the eventual ruination of his career, so it was time for Chris Hughton, whose depressing, defensive football was the opposite of Lambert’s approach in those heady days where he knew joy and didn’t look like this. He kept us up for another season — we finished 11th, actually, though with fewer points — and then we were relegated in 2013/14. This despite splashing out on our club record fee — an honour held until this year — to purchase a disappointing striker called Ricky van Wolfswinkel. (Just personally, I feel like a player called ‘Richard of Wolfdick’ should be treated with suspicion, but we were not a well run club back then.) We’d get promoted via the playoffs the very next season under Alex Neil, a hugely enjoyable campaign which ended in a trip to Wembley — we crushed Middlesbrough to go up, and it was genuinely some of the most fun I’ve had at a Norwich game. 

Then relegation, again, and a couple years of mediocrity in the Championship — except it was all change at Carrow Road, with sporting director Stuart Webber and manager Daniel Farke coming in and transforming Norwich into a well-run team. It was very strange, both because of the novelty of Norwich making reliably smart decisions — no more Wolfswinkels for us — but also because I’d gone to uni and couldn’t make matches as regularly. As much as Norwich were becoming the team I’d always wanted them to be, I was also just not really around for it as much. 

It was also around this period that I started to transition, and I think I’ve always slightly underrated how big the football was in helping me navigate some parts of that. To start with, I’d been anxious about how what felt like such a big change would interrupt the routines of going to matches, that I’d feel somehow out of place and the whole thing would just be uncomfortable. How do you say to the person who’s been sitting next to you at Carrow Road for most of your life but you’ve never had a real conversation with that you’re a girl now? I shouldn’t have worried, though; nobody ever seemed to care, and I never got any grief for it. I’d been worried, too, that transitioning would change my relationships with my dad and brother, and football helped demonstrate — if not itself ensure — that it didn’t. The rituals stayed the same, I was just a slightly different person.

Anyway, eventually the clever decisions on the football pitch left their mark and we went up as champions in 2018/19, apparently a year ahead of schedule. We were, admittedly, relegated instantly — finishing twentieth. It was depressing, particularly because the final games of the season, in which we amassed not a single point, were played behind closed doors due to the pandemic. Yet even though we hadn’t come bottom of the table in our previous top-flight misadventures, this one felt better than the many, many other relegations I’d experienced as a Norwich fan. Part of that is the pandemic, both because it was clear our form at the end of the season had a lot to do with the unplanned break caused by covid and the lack of supporters to spur the team on, and because it’s harder to feel crushed by a relegation when you can’t actually be there in person. 

But it was also because there was so much reason to be optimistic: for pretty much the first time I could remember, there was clear evidence of a plan for how the team would develop, and I think everyone’s attitude was that we’d been a bit lucky to go up, had given the Premier League a good go, but realistically we weren’t quite good enough. We would be, though, and the optimism also came from the sheer quality of that squad, particularly Emi Buendia, who — and I really hate to admit this out of loyalty to Wessi — is probably the best player I’ve ever seen wear the yellow and green. We not only had a plan, but we also had an ability to reliably identify good players, which to Norwich fans was a novelty.

It’s hard for me to write about the 2020/21 season for Norwich: it was objectively one of our best in living memory, as we absolutely destroyed the Championship and, for the second time running, finished first. Whereas in our last promotion, we’d been probably the second or third best team in the league but managed to go up despite that — partly owing to another Leeds implosion to gift us the title — we were just hysterically dominant. Yet I didn’t see much of it: I’ve never been particularly good at watching football when I can’t actually go to the stadium, and my emotional investment was just that much less. I still cared; I just didn’t feel like part of it in the same way you do when you’re in a crowd at a game, willing the players forward within a collective will.

Yesterday I felt part of that again. The squad’s stronger than it was last time, although we’ve sold Buendia and are clearly still adapting. I think we could do with a few more signings — another centre-back, cover at left-back, a proper defensive midfielder — but I’m optimistic, even though the consensus seems to be that we’ll be relegated again. Against Liverpool, we could have been better — but we could have been worse, and I’m excited to see how the team develops. Most of all, I’m just so happy to be going to the football again.

I’m probably far from alone in having found the way the pandemic has interrupted the rituals of everyday life extraordinarily difficult to deal with. Our place in the world is defined through both the big rituals like going to the football on a Saturday and the tiny traditions, walking up the hill from the pub as the line-ups get announced, popping into Tesco to get a chocolate bar on the way, sitting in the same seat as I always have. It’s a sense of belonging, yes, of finding my place in a collective whether that’s the crowd in the Barclay or my family; but it’s also just knowing who I am, no matter what might change.