Against Cardiff last Saturday Norwich did the hard part, the hard way, by scoring twice to snatch a point after the Bluebirds seemed to be cruising to a 2-0 victory. Unfortunately, by big Sam's reckoning, the Canaries are not finding the easy part all that easy! Conceding a penalty in each of the first three league games speaks for itself, even if the one at Coventry was the result of an extremely harsh decision.
Against Birmingham the hard part is likely to be even harder, because the Blues will be desperate to erase the memory of their Carling Cup exit at St Mary's. Therefore, Canary fans will be hoping for a repeat of that Premiership win, when Darren Huckerby dribbled the ball from deep inside his own half, leaving a string of Birmingham players floundering in his wake, before scoring the only goal of the game with a shot from the edge of their penalty area.
Of course, fight-backs to grab a point can be highly entertaining, as in that 4-4 result at home to Middlesbrough, but a 1.- result earns three points, which is what Glenn Roeder will expect his players to take from the game against the team tipped for automatic promotion and already topping the Championship table.
Readers of the last Canary Talk article will not be surprised to learn that the 'Miss of the Match' award has been discontinued following Jamie Cureton's decision to go for the award rather than hit his two-hundredth goal from the penalty spot at Ninian Park!
With the threat of winning the dreaded award removed from the equation, if Arturo does not conjure up another goal or two, it is quite likely that Curo will come off the bench to score the winning goal! After all, it is a well known fact that football can be a funny old game; even if Manchester United fans were less than amused when the Canaries kept a clean sheet and scored two goals in that most memorable of all results in their recent, all too brief spell in the Premiership.