Is there any point in this Norwich City side getting promoted?

Now, this question may seem quite irrelevant considering that our current form is leaving us looking down rather than up, but it is one that has been troubling me ever since City’s summer transfer window policy became clear. The squad overhaul and introduction of youth that many Norwich fans hoped for didn’t transpire as Alex Neil’s playing resources stayed pretty much the same.

This has left us with a squad that has already proven once, and in some cases twice (or in Sebastien Bassong’s case, four times), that they are not up to Premier League standard. Not only that, it is a largely ageing squad - full of players who are looking increasingly less interested in playing football for Norwich City and increasingly more interested in just hanging around the club and collecting their extortionate wage packet. Nonetheless, it is a squad that is more than capable of (perhaps with the help of a change of manager) achieving promotion back to the Premier League. This begs the question - is there any point?

I can’t help but feel that there is little point in Norwich getting promoted until we shift some of the disinterested and demotivated old guard, and replace them with young and hungry players - players that are on their way up rather than on their way down, and players who have not had their careers blighted by relegation upon relegation.

Whilst I will never, ever not be able to scream, sing and shout City on to promotion, I can’t help but feel that, thinking long-term, mere consolidation in the Championship would be in our better interests this year. This will then leave us with next summer to try and do what we should have done in the one that’s just gone by: offload all of the players that have more than outstayed than welcome - there are a lot of them. Sebastien Bassong, Michael Turner, Stephen Whittaker, Russell Martin, Ryan Bennett and Alex Tettey, to name just a few. None of these will offer anything to the club going forward. In their place, we need to breed a mix of youth - the likes of the Murphy twins and Louis Thomson - and players, ‘hidden gems’ so to speak, that are on an upward, rather than downward, trajectory.

Under Paul Lambert we did this. When we were in League One, the likes of Grant Holt and Wes Hoolahan came to the club as ‘unpolished diamonds’, as did the likes of Andrew Surman during the Championship season and Anthony Pilkington and Bradley Johnson in the Premier League campaign. Each of these were players that were desperate to play at the highest level, each with something to prove and each who would fight tooth and nail to make sure tthat they achieved their goal. How many players can you say that this is true of in our current squad? Very few, and the few that you could make a genuine case for - players like Alex Pritchard, Sergi Canos, Louis Thomson and Carlton Morris - never even play.

Once the under-performing old guard have been sold and replaced with younger, hungrier options - then we can begin to think about promotion to the Premier League being a worthwhile pursuit again. Without huge summer investment, going up with our current squad will inevitably end in exactly the same way as our last two Premier League seasons: relegation.

If we want to avoid being nothing more than a yo-yo club then we need to properly use this season, next summer, and next season to re-build. To find the next Grant Holt, the next Wes Hoolahan, the next Bradley Johnson. After all, it is players like that, the cheap, rough diamonds, rather than the expensive, gleaming ones (Ricky van Wolfswinkel, Leroy Fer, Steven Naismith etc), that have brought Norwich City success in the past.