Krul, 33, is one of the leaders of the team now and the confidence on the ball he has exhibited at Norwich is one of the reasons why he is in pole position to be Holland's starting keeper at the Euros this summer.
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Rub of the greens: The vegetable patch at Norwich's impressive training centre They have been hardened by relegation and buoyed by the achievement of battling their way out of the Championship at the first opportunity.
Partly, that is because players who were young and inexperienced at the start of last season and went into matches at cathedrals like Old Trafford and Anfield wide-eyed and awestruck, have come of age. The club are confident that will not happen again. Norwich went straight back down the last time they made it to the top flight. The club has a fine manager, too, in Daniel Farke and they sealed promotion back to the Premier League a fortnight ago after a season in the Championship and clinched the title yesterday with a victory over Reading. The club is doing a real life Football Manager.' I have signed a couple of contract extensions here already. It's been amazing to be part of that journey. 'Now, we have one of the best training grounds in the country. I will never forget it: I was doing my leg weights and there was rain coming through the roof and there were buckets on the floor positioned to catch all the leaks. It is on two floors now and it is state of the art but when I first signed, it was in a little conservatory. The training ground was just a lot of Portakabins. 'I arrived here three years ago and it was very different then.
Webber researched the technology when he visited former RB Leipzig director Ralf Rangnick 'Little things like that sum up the values of the club. 'I went over to look at it this morning actually,' he says. Goalkeeper Tim Krul, one of the cornerstones of Norwich's Championship promotion campaign this season and the kind of player who exemplifies the idea that signings at a club need to be about character as well as talent, smiles at the mention of the vegetable patch. Norwich have eliminated their debt and are bouncing back from the Championship healthier and more confident than ever. The criticism aimed at Norwich seems especially misguided now that we can see, in the shape of the desperation of clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona to reap extra cash from the creation of the European Super League, exactly where profligacy and excess can lead.
Clubs like Sheffield Wednesday, Derby and Sunderland went down a different road.
They still had debts and they stuck to their principles and decided they did not want to risk the future of the club to pay, say, £8million to take Tammy Abraham on loan. Norwich were accused by some of a lack of ambition the last time they were promoted to the Premier League because they refused to spend money they did not have.
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But they do things differently here.Īt the behest of sporting director, Stuart Webber, Norwich recently became the first English club to invest in the revolutionary football simulator If Ed Woodward ran Norwich, he'd sign a new official concrete partner so he could fill in that vegetable patch and pave it over everyone knows there's no profit in chard. The food grown here and the butternut squash in the greenhouse will be used for soups and vegetarian meals by the cooks in the players' canteen. And no, it's not the Dulux dog.īehind one of the goals at Norwich City's impressive new training centre, protected from errant shots by strategically placed netting, David, the club's gardener, kneels in the earth tending to rows of broad beans, kale, leek and chard. In the search for the antidote to the untrammelled greed of the six billionaire owners who were ready to lay waste to English football a fortnight ago, it might be hard to improve on a symbol of the intelligent, diligent stewardship of one of our leading clubs that sits at one end of their first team training pitch.