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Norwich City author, Ed Couzens-Lake, shares his thoughts with us about the transfer deadline day capture of Sergi Canos, a player who seems delighted to be back at Griffin Park, a place he has called ‘home’.

There weren’t many Norwich fans offering a negative opinion when Sergi Canos joined the club from Liverpool in the Summer.

Schooled at Barcelona and Liverpool, graduated at Griffin Park. Thirty eight league appearances for the Bees in the 2015/16 season, proven ability to match the hype plus an eyebrow raising goal for you against Reading. Liverpool even went as far as to give us due warning about what to expect when they included a buy back fee as part of the deal that took him from Merseyside to Norfolk.

What’s not to like?

I watched him in a pre-season game against Coventry. Canos was impressive, comfortable on the ball, confident and looking to be involved throughout. He tormented the Sky Blues defence, a twisting, turning, shoulder dipping and dancing demon of a winger with a smile on his face and a level of footballing joie d vivre that you more commonly saw in a school playground.

It came as a surprise, therefore, when he didn’t make the starting line up for our opening league fixture at Blackburn, his place going to Jacob Murphy.

But Murphy excelled in our 4-1 win and has been a mainstay in the team ever since. This is despite, as far back as September, Alex Neil insisting he’d need rest throughout the season and that Canos would get his chance. Fast forward to the present and Murphy has featured in 28 of our 32 League and Cup games thus far, translating potential and promise into the genuine article and relegating Canos to the sidelines in the process. His one league start came in the 3-0 surrender at Birmingham on August 27th, an all round no show that saw him hooked and replaced by Josh Murphy, Jacob’s brother.

In the months since then, when asked about Canos, Alex Neil has tended to stare at his feet and mumble something along the lines of, “Sergi and I have had a chat, he knows what I expect from him”.

Playing football, clearly, was not one of those things.

I can’t tell you anything more about Sergi Canos that you don’t know already. I’m delighted at Jacob Murphy’s rise to prominence, a Premier League player to be without question. Yet it’s also a great pity that Sergi Canos has been deemed as nothing more than a £2.5 million incentive for Jacob to get his act together-and, now that he has, Sergi can be sent back, box unopened and potential unrealised.

I hope he rips a few defences a new one for you between now and the end of the season. I’m sure he will.

Edward Couzens-Lake

 

Ed’s book, Fantasy Football, is available for just £5 here.

Norwich City were expected, at best, to just `make up the numbers’ during the first season of Premier League football in 1992/93. The team had barely escaped with their top flight lives the previous campaign and, in a pre-season that saw a new manager appointed, as well as their top player and talisman leave the club, few predicted anything other than a harsh struggle and inevitable relegation. How wrong could they be? Edward Couzens-Lake’s book looks back in detail at that time, the setting up of the Premier League and the amazing season that followed at Carrow Road, including new and exclusive interviews from the players and officials involved with the club then, as well as the supporters. Personal retrospectives of a very special time at a very special football club