3 things we learnt from Norwich City’s 2015/16 season

1. The club failed to learn from previous mistakes.

Anyone who has followed Norwich for a considerable amount of time will remember the frustration of the Premier League campaign under Nigel Worthington, and in certain aspects it was like a repeat of that season.

In both seasons our activity in the transfer market has been far too reactive, rather than proactive, which has arguably cost us the valuable points to keep us up.

It was pretty obvious that the side’s defence needed tightening up this season, but we waited until January to bring in Timm Klose, and it very much left people thinking “what if.”

The big Swiss defender helped to galvanise the side up until his injury, which could be argued was another turning point in our season as he would go on to miss the remainder of the campaign.

Just like 2004/05, we waited too long to buy what we needed and suffered as a result. Had we had Dean Ashton that season, things could have been significantly different.

There have been a lot of people pointing fingers in various directions, but you would hope that it is a lesson we could finally learn for next time.

2. Having a goalscorer is invaluable.

Cameron Jerome scored three Premier League goals this season. Photo: Marc Atkins/Offside.

It has been a really frustrating season for Norwich’s strikers and I really do feel for someone like Cameron Jerome, who put everything in with little reward.

Compare our frontline to that of Sunderland’s, and it is pretty easy to see why we ended up going down at the expense of the Black Cats.

He may seem like a relative veteran at the age of 33, but Jermain Defoe found the net 15 times in the Premier League and was the undoubted difference between the two sides.

Sunderland picked up 20 points in games that Defoe scored in, with Norwich picking up 15 in the games Dieumerci Mbokani (9) and Cameron Jerome (6) scored in.

It is quite possibly the oldest cliché in the book, but goals really do win you games and coincidentally Norwich finished five points behind Sunderland.

We had to show faith to Jerome after last season and Mbokani was always going to be a gamble, but I think we needed a new frontman in January.

Instead we signed Patrick Bamford – who had not been getting a look in at Crystal Palace.

3. There should have been no room for sentiment.

The statistic of how many players started against Manchester United that also starred in our previous relegation campaign pretty much summed up the predicament we were in.

To put it simply, what do you expect when you are trying to stay up with players who have already suffered relegation – we needed to freshen the squad up a lot more.

Whilst I accept that you have to show loyalty to the players that got you into the Premier League, we had to reshape the spine to give ourselves a chance.

I thought Robbie Brady was a good addition, but he was another player who had only experienced relegation from the Premier League, which is not what this squad needed.

The side required players with experience of staying in the league or someone with a winning mentality, which is what I would say is one of Klose’s traits.

The Lambert model is another worth noting, where he signed players who had a point to prove and were really hungry to show the top level what they could do.

Either way, we need to adopt a different approach next time we return, which I am confident will be soon.