Norwich City’s yo-yo status is partly structural, but they’ve also made errors

Norwich City are the first side to be relegated from the Premier League – a result of bad decisions, not learning and a lack of decisiveness.

The benefit of hindsight confirms that it was the most temporary of breaks in the cloud. On January 21, Norwich City won 3-0 at Watford. It was their second successive win, following a 2-1 victory against Everton six days earlier, and it lifted them to 17th place in the Premier League table. But less than a week later, Newcastle won 1-0 at Leeds and Norwich were back in the bottom three. They’ve been there ever since, slowly sliding from view.

There is a bitter irony to the fact that their relegation should have been confirmed at this particular venue. Last summer, Aston Villa came for Emi Buendia, who’d been the motor behind Norwich’s return to the Premier League last season. Then, following a start to this campaign which felt ominous from the get-go, Dean Smith took over at Carrow Road having been sacked himself by Aston Villa. Add the extra narrative that Smith is Birmingham born and bred as well as a supporter of the club, and perhaps it was inevitable that the numbers would stop adding up for Norwich at Villa Park.

These numbers haven’t added up since the summer. Three teams have to fall from the Premier League at the end of each season, and it hasn’t really been possible to see how Norwich wouldn’t be one of them since they kicked off against Liverpool last August. Indeed, even the reaction in some quarters that we should ‘disregard’ their first four fixtures because they were against Liverpool, Manchester City, Leicester and Arsenal carried an air of fatalism about it that has lingered ever since.

Fulham and Norwich are opposites trapped in a dangerous cycle

They lost those