Norwich City The Noughties

The castle lies at the heart of the city while the cathedral is its soul. But the football club, modest in name yet bright and vibrant with it, is its life. Unlike any other city in England, the day-to-day life of Norwich was, is now, and ever shall be intertwined with the fortunes of its famous football club. Whether in time of crisis or celebration at Carrow Road, the emotions of the club are carried and shared by the people of Norwich. For the first seventy years or so, the Canaries rarely rattled their own cages, let alone those of their rivals but the club rose from sleepy obscurity into the previously unheard-of heights of English football's top flight for the first time in the 1970s. The following decades were ones of highs and lows, as well as a new celebrity owner in the shape of TV chef, Delia Smith, and this pattern continued into the new Millenium with the club dropping into the third tier of English football before promotion back to the Championship and the hope of revival as the decade closed.