If Norwich City lose at Watford on Wednesday, or if Sunderland beat Everton at home, they will be relegated. Even if Norwich win both that game and the one at Everton next Sunday - and they’ve lost their last four - they are reliant on both Sunderland and Newcastle slipping up. An instant return to the Championship looks probable.
After Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at home to Manchester United, Alex Neil was clear about what he felt had gone wrong this season. “We were last to go up, through the playoffs, and the recruitment team needed to be put together a bit more than what it was, so that wasn’t fully functioning in the way it should’ve been,” he said. “And there have been players we’ve tried to attract that ultimately we didn’t manage to get. If you combine all those reasons we found ourselves in a situation where we didn’t add as many as we’d have liked.”
Having splashed out £13.5m on Ricky van Wolfswinkel and Gary Hooper in their last Premier League season - seven goals between them - a certain caution in spending was perhaps understandable, but loan deals for Dieumerci Mbokani and Patrick Bamford didn’t bring the necessary firepower. That meant a January spree. Timm Klose, bought for £9m from Wolfsburg, made a clear difference to the defence but he suffered a knee injury at Crystal Palace, since when Norwich haven’t picked up a point. Naismith, meanwhile, signed for £8.25m from Everton, has been a huge disappointment.
Ultimately, it looks as though the fates of those two January signings will end up costing Norwich. Newcastle spent a combined £24m on Jonjo Shelvey, who has been inconsistent, and Andros Townsend, who has scored four goals but, even if they end up failing to get the two points they need to guarantee survival from their remaining two games of the season, it’s Sunderland who invested best in January, Jan Kirchhoff, Lamine Kone and Wahbi Khazri all playing key roles in their improvement.
Norwich simply haven’t offered sufficient threat in front of goal. Mbokani is joint top-scorer with Nathan Redmond with five goals in a side that is averaging under a goal a game and has the third lowest goals tally (35) in the division.
Mbokani has won 4.1 aerials per game, so he at least offers a physical threat and an outlet, but Jerome has started the last two games - the 1-0 defeats to Arsenal and Manchester United - presumably because he is quicker and provides a more natural target for the through-balls of Wes Hoolahan in a game in which the opposition dominates possession.
Jerome, though, averages just 0.2 key passes per game. That may be forgivable if he were scoring significant numbers of goals, but he has just three this season and has the worst clear-chance conversion rate of any striker (15.4%) in the league.
It’s Naismith, though, who’s been the big disappointment. At Everton, he looked like a player who was unfortunate not to get more playing time, but he simply hasn’t fitted in at Carrow Road. 451 minutes for Everton this season brought three goals - all of them against Chelsea - and eight key passes; 709 minutes for Norwich have brought one goal and nine key passes. He has had more shots and won more aerial duels. Shots per 90 minutes have remained the same and aerials gone up slightly, but there’s a reason his WhoScored rating has dropped from 6.61 to 6.38.
Whether that’s more to do with Naismith or the players around him is debatable, but the fact is that the signing hasn’t worked. Maybe if he’d arrived last summer, the process of settling in would have been simpler, but Sam Allardyce’s signings at Sunderland have had an impact in a way that Neil’s haven’t. He’s been unfortunate with Klose’s injury, but Norwich’s record of 3.4 shots on target per game, the third-worst figure in the league, tells its own story.
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