Mr. Norwich

This piece was published in a special edition of Glory magazine on 27 July 2019. Please support this project buying a copy from the club shop or online here: bit.ly/GloryNCFC. Check out the other output from Glory, it is a brilliant series of must-have and must-read editions: http://www.glorymag.co.uk/

When I was 12, I came home from school to learn from Ceefax that Dave Stringer had left his job as Norwich City’s manager. I stood rooted to the spot. Something like this had never happened to me in my short life as a Canaries fanatic. Under his leadership, Norwich had soared. We had our best ever league finish to that point. We’d reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup. It was all thanks to Mr. Stringer and now he was gone.

They say you should never have heroes, that they always let you down in the end. But this is a man who has played his entire career in East Anglia. He was youth coach, reserves manager, and then put together a first team that bossed the best in the country. So it was with some real trepidation that I listened back to Dave Stringer’s interview for this edition of Glory Magazine. Would he be like some of the Norwich managers who have come and gone. Or does he really live up to his moniker of Mr. Norwich?

Let’s just get this one out of the way. Dave Stringer is a nice guy. Listening to his soft Norfolk words, you’re at ease. What constitutes ‘the Norwich way’ is up for debate, but we agree that Norfolk people like nice. And he’s that. He’s a humble man. On every topic, he has someone else to praise. Duncan Forbes was his partner in the solid defence. Dave Williams, his assistant manager, comes up more than once when discussing his managerial triumphs. He puts his success down to the system, to the team, to the club.

Humility isn’t enough of course. He speaks often of his own hunger, and in success coming from giving the young players hunger today. “The philosophy of the football club is bringing players from the academy… why have an academy if you don’t bring them through and use them; if they can’t see a future for themselves… it gives them an incentive to work hard at the bottom end.”

It’s a mark of Stringer that he saves some of his only harsh words for “managers [who] come in just trying to get success momentarily, they don’t bother about the academy.”

Developing youth is central to Stringer’s view of the game. “That’s the way we always used to do it”, he says, speaking fondly of Jeremy Goss, Ruel Fox and Dale Gordon — players he managed as youth team manager, and later as the first team manager. “We didn’t buy top division players, we bought from lower divisions and brought them through.” The parallels with Daniel Farke’s team hardly need spelling out.

It’s not on the managerial side that there are comparisons between Stringer’s days and today.

Originally a fullback, Stringer talks about breaking into the team in words you could (more or less) put into Max Aarons’ mouth. “1966 was the world cup winning year, that’s when they brought in attacking fullbacks, which was a 4–3–3. That left a space for the fullbacks to get down the line, which is what I had to do.”

“I’d love to play today, the way they play out from the back.”

He didn’t stay a full back for long, moving into a centre-back role alongside Duncan Forbes, a partnership he describes as “little and large”, a combination of two different, complementary players. “Duncan used to say, ‘The ball may go past, the player may go past, but both together? No chance’.”

Of course, it’s nice to see continuity between Stringer’s playing days, and the young lads of today — and there are many. But the differences are stark. Stringer was working as an engineering apprentice and playing youth football in his spare time when Norwich came in for him. “They offered me £12 a week. My father said, you’re not taking that, you can get more in your own profession.” It wasn’t all bad news, Stringer remembers with a chuckle: “there was a £750 bonus if the team was in the top 8 come Christmas. Shared across the whole team.”

I don’t know about you, but all I’ve ever really wanted from a Norwich player is a hunger to wear the shirt. In his own way, you can still hear the commitment Stringer had as a young recruit to the team. After signing, he spent almost two years in the reserves before making his debut against Coventry City at the end of his second year. “They weren’t doing too well so they decided to give me a chance — then it took them thirteen years to get me out!”

You get the sense that Stringer is as happy as any other Norwich fan with the way Norwich played their way to the 2019 title. As a manager, he says he wanted the team to play the ball, and pass it. “The sort of football they’re playing now, it’s the possession”, he says — just like in his day. “We played some teams off the pitch, and I’m talking about Liverpool and Manchester United.” It wasn’t as simple to do in his playing days. “When you’re playing on pitches, like at Derby County… you walked onto the pitch and you sink that far into the ground. It’s no good trying to play football on that, you’ve got to lift the ball across the ground.” Full backs and wingers were the quick ones, he says, because they had grass to play on, by the end of a season pitches were “four corners of grass on, and then mud in the middle”.

Norwich City have been fairly well served by managers overs the years. Stringer was preceded by Ron Saunders, John Bond and Ken Brown, and Mike Walker, Paul Lambert and Daniel Farke have come since. All contributed to the Norwich way in their own way, and Stringer had his. “I had the trait of wanting to have players to give it their all while they were here at the club, in training, in playing but outside of that actually enjoying themselves because they’ve got to have a life as well.” He combined the discipline of Saunders, with the easy going nature of Bond. “We had a good team spirit, they know where the lines are they shouldn’t cross but also need to do their jobs.”

His easy-going approach with the players didn’t always extend to his relationship with the men in suits. He served during the turbulent Robert Chase era, when finances came first and there was only one man in charge. Chase could be, at times, very generous but had his own agenda focused on the business of property development and developing the ground. A story Stringer tells shines a light on those days. “I was going in to get a player, and he was looking out the window, looking over at where the flats are now but it was car park then. See that? I’ve just bought that for £1m. I thought that’s my player out the window.”

So, how did he cope with players being sold from under his nose? “Not very well,” he gently says. When he was told Steve Bruce was on his way, his response was a desperate, “no way I’m letting him go, we’re bottom of the league!” Stringer says he understood the financial pressures but never felt like the finances were being managed with a football plan in mind. “We didn’t have a strategy. We knew we’d have to let players go […] what we should have done is got someone in to fill that position before we let someone go but it doesn’t always work like that.”

The sale of Andy Linegan almost brought Stringer’s time with Norwich to an end too. “I didn’t know too much about that until the deal was nearly done, and I didn’t really go along with that at all. I was on the verge of resigning at that time, I was talked out of it.”

He stayed because he is a loyal man. Loyal to his team but loyal to the city too. And despite the pressures and difficulties, they were good years. “It was only four years I was manager”, he says, before reeling off his record of two FA Cup semifinals and a top-four finish.

Even after he felt like his time was up as manager, he wanted to stay close. “I thought the team needed somebody else, to come in fresh, and they appointed Mike and look what happened, they went to Bayern.” Stringer also went to Bayern, and all our European tour games that season. In his role assisting the academy again he even visited Munich’s to get ideas. Stringer had a tentative offer to go and manage abroad “but I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to do the youth academy. And I wanted to retire early. You don’t live forever.”

He’s a club ambassador nowadays. It’s a perfect role, for him, and for the club. He wants to enjoy retirement, and people want to natter with him after the game. It means that since ending his ‘proper’ career at Norwich, he’s seen our highs and lows. He’s seen them before, mind. Stringer played in the game against Watford where Norwich clinched the Second Division title 47 years ago. Players come and go. Managers come and go. The club will always be here. With his humility, passion for good football, determination and loyalty, David Stringer epitomises Norwich City. It’s okay to have heroes after all.