Failure to sign a striker already costing City as Wednesday’s visit ends in disappointing 0-0 draw

Norwich City’s first home game of the 2016/17 season concluded with a chorus of boos from large sections of the home support as Sheffield Wednesday held Alex Neil’s side to a disappointing, and hugely frustrating, 0-0 draw. The elation that followed last weekend’s performance at Blackburn quickly dissipated as a completely uninspiring attacking display, in which we mustered just two shots on target, left the Carrow Road faithful feeling largely unsatisfied on Saturday evening.

After such an impressive senior league debut at Ewood Park, City could have done without Jacob Murphy missing the game through injury, but with a player the quality of Robbie Brady coming in for the 21-year-old, it shouldn’t have been a major issue. Steven Naismith, Wes Hoolahan and Jonny Howson had all been heavily involved in some wonderful attacking football last weekend and, with Brady added to this mix, the prospects of a similarly impressive offensive performance looked good. As it transpired, however, this was not to be the case.

Before I get too caught up in the negativity, it has to be remembered that Sheffield Wednesday are a far stronger outfit than the Blackburn side we faced last weekend and, as a result, it was always going to be a tougher test for City. The core of the side that did so well in reaching the play-off final last season has been retained and under Carlos Carvalhal they are an extremely well organised outfit; I fully expect them to be competing for a top six place again come May. This being said, the strength of Wednesday does nothing to justify what was a truly lacklustre display from Norwich.

Last time we were in the Championship, in 2014/15, we continuously struggled to break teams down. As a newly relegated team back then (as we are now), most teams came to Carrow Road happy to defend and, with the onus on ourselves to chase victory, left it to us to try and forge a way through. This often resulted in us becoming unstuck - shown by the fact that we actually had a better record away from Carrow Road as our opposition were more likely to open up when they were playing at home, which suited Neil’s set-up far better. With this in mind, Saturday’s performance felt very much like deja-vu. Despite dominating large periods of the game, City never really looked like scoring. Our attacking play, that was so fluid last weekend, suddenly became embarrassingly disjointed and even the in-form Wes Hoolahan was consistently careless in possession. Jonny Howson was uncharacteristically anonymous, Cameron Jerome characteristically dozy and Steven Naismith ineffectual. Together they mustered just two shots on target - for a home team that are supposedly chasing promotion, this is, quite simply, not good enough.

In fairness, the first-half injury to Martin Olsson did not help matters as it forced Brady, one of our main attacking threats, back into the left-back position whilst Josh Murphy, his replacement, looked like a young man overawed by the occasion. Purely based on the fact that Josh has a year’s worth of Championship experience over his brother Jacob, it was largely anticipated that the former would be the man to have more of an impact this season. If the first two games are anything to go by, however, then the opposite will be true - the large threat that we carried down the left flank with Olsson and Brady was all but gone as soon as Josh entered the park.

The largest frustration City supporters have with Saturday’s performance is that the club’s inability to sign a striker was worryingly exposed and, arguably, is already costing us points. It is quite frankly unforgivable that having had three months to prepare for the new season, we are still without the signing that we needed most: a forward to compete with Cameron Jerome. In desperate need of fresh attacking impetus and with Jerome having one of his quieter days, who did Alex Neil resort to bringing on in the striker’s place? Defensive midfielder, Youssouf Mulumbu. The only other option that Neil had to his disposal was the untried and completely untested Carlton Morris - the 20-year-old who has just eight SPL goals to his name and has never netted a league goal in England. As I said, unforgivable.

The longer that we go on without bringing in a striker, the more it will continue to cost us and the greater the discontent among the City supporters will be, as it slowly becomes clear that the board, yet again, have failed to learn from their past mistakes.

Anyway, back to the game: uninspiring as the performance was, there are some positives: we kept a clean-sheet (a rare feat for an Alex Neil side) against a promotion rival, we remain unbeaten and we have another home game on Tuesday night - against the early front-runners Bristol City - to quickly put our frustrations to bed.