In the summer of 1992, Norwich City were rubbish. You can ask anyone. They’d finished the last season
in 18th, picking up one point from their final eight games. Rubbish.
That summer they replaced manager Dave Stringer with one of his coaches, someone called Mike
Walker, whose last managerial job had been at Colchester United five years previously.
To make matters worse, on the eve of the new season, top goalscorer Robert Fleck forced
through a move to Chelsea for £2.1m. The pundits were almost unanimous: Norwich were
going down. But it didn’t quite work out like that.
The first sign that something weird was about to happen came on the opening day of the the
inaugural Premier League season. Norwich were away at Arsenal, tipped by some as title contenders,
and at half time they were 0-2 down.
The players rather expected Walker to tell them to go into damage limitation mode, but
damage limitation mode wasn’t really a concept Walker understood. He told them to keep attacking.
They won 4-2.
Four days later, they faced Chelsea at Carrow Road with Fleck watching from the stands.
They won that game too, with Fleck’s replacement scoring his third of the season.
Four points were dropped against Everton and Manchester City, but then Norwich went on
a ludicrous run, beating Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest, Southampton, Chelsea again (because
the fixture computer was a Spectrum 48k with a wobbly power pack) and Sheffield Wednesday.
It was all very strange.
Norwich had few players of any note. Bryan Gunn was a club legend, Ruel Fox was an emerging
talent and young Chris Sutton looked a bit special, but for the most part these were
hitherto unspectacular footballers playing out of their skins. A sort of proto-Leicester,
if you will.
The giants of English football breathed a huge sigh of relief on October the third when
big spending, Alan Shearer infused Blackburn Rovers spanked seven past Norwich and ended
their impetuous run. Two games later, Liverpool, struggling in the bottom half, put four past
them and knocked them off the table. The bubble had burst.
Except it hadn’t. Because Norwich’s response to getting knocked off the top was to scramble
back up there again. In quick succession, they beat Oldham, Sheffield United, Aston
Villa and Wimbledon.
It was December 5 and they had 39 of the 42 points that Walker had joked they needed to
be reasonably sure of avoiding relegation. More than that, they were eight points clear
at the top of the table.
Brilliantly, they had also conceded 31 goals, more than all but three teams from the rest
of the division. Not that Walker cared. “I’d happily win 4-3 all season,” he said. “You
get three points for 4-3, and only one for nil-nil.”
But it couldn’t last. On December 12, Manchester United beat them by a single goal at Carrow
Road. Then came an even worse result: A 0-2 defeat at home to hated rivals Ipswich Town.
After all the talk of 4-3’s, Norwich went five games without scoring and didn’t win
again until January the 27th.
Norwich were tenacious, they wouldn’t give up on the title race. They beat fellow challengers
Aston Villa at the end of March and when Manchester United came to Carrow Road, hungrily pursing
*their* first title in 26 years, they were top by a single point. But United played them
off the park.
Another gubbing, 1-5 at the hands of Tottenham, left them seven points adrift of Alex Ferguson’s
men. Another defeat to Ipswich, of all teams, finally ended any lingering hopes of glory.
Norwich City finished the season in third, magnificently with a negative goal difference,
having conceded 65 goals in a 42 match campaign. But it wasn’t enough to secure UEFA Cup
football and an unforgettable, Jeremy Goss-powered night against Bayern Munich. But that is another story.
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