TAKE: The Case Against Sacking Thorup | OneFootball

I can’t help but feel, given the timing and given the vibes from recent games, that player power has played a massive part in this decision. That was my immediate thought when hearing the news, and it was the players who made my decision to leave Carrow Road on 70 minutes on Friday, not the head coach.

Several of them have downed tools in recent weeks on the pitch and displayed a complete lack of professionalism off it. Those who have reacted publicly are supposed to be among the experienced “pros” in the squad (the biggest use of air quotes ever). They may be tenured and influential here, but good role models for our younger core they are not. They’re also not as good at football as they think they are and will be out of the door regardless in a few weeks.

This is exactly what we couldn’t allow to happen – to lose sight of our move towards fast and energetic football with young and energetic players, because a few old timers have had their egos bruised. No one under the age of 30 in this squad has voiced their displeasure at what’s going on. This commitment to a new style of play and a data-led approach all suddenly feels very unserious and half-baked in typical Norwich fashion. Especially when you come out and say “top six was the target” yet never once saying as much at the beginning of the season, or at any point during it.

To use the word “vibes” again, it feels like a very ordinary, reactionary sacking that any other club would make. It has come straight after an Easter weekend where fan unrest and player disinterest has reached boiling point similar to two years ago. There are footballing metrics which will support the argument to sack Thorup and I’m sure my fellow ACN’ers will cover those angles in their postmortems. I accept that. But to me it feels, predominantly, like they’ve bowed to the baying mob who clearly have no memory of 2018 and pandered to those who have no future here anyway.

Blackburn (A), and the way that stoppage time was mismanaged by those on the pitch, may well have been the beginning of the fractures. Thorup had been rather blunt in his assessment of some performances since, and we also got a sense of the temperature in that Ewood Park dressing room from the club’s YouTube docuseries. Several players just haven’t been rowing in the same boat for some time and that’s often led to the more calamitous and kamikaze goals being conceded and points being thrown away.

Many games this season, even some of the better ones, have been blotted by individual errors and moments of poor footballing IQ which, if you listen to Thorup’s attempts to diagnose them, clearly weren’t part of his vision. Some players clearly just aren’t interested, at this stage of their careers, in embracing new ideas or putting in hard work. Or even showing their coach, or the culture he’s trying to build, respect it seems.

If anything, Thorup should’ve been even more cutthroat in dealing with them but a lack of depth and a need to show competitiveness and secure supporter ‘buy in’ in year one of the project dictated that they continued to feature. Then throw in a lack of tracking back, and lack of marking in the six-yard box into the mix and you have a truly toxic cocktail. No coach in world football has jogging, not showing for the ball, carelessness in possession and no desire to win the ball back as the fundamentals of their philosophy.

He’s been badly let down, even from when a certain individual walked out before a ball was kicked on the opening day. If Thorup had indeed “lost the dressing room” – good. The club needs to lose a lot of these players too. The board should’ve doubled down, backed Thorup to continue to shape the squad in his image and only then could we have fairly assessed whether his instructions were too intricate and too flawed to succeed in this division. But we all know that’s not how this business works.

You know what comes now? Another transition season.