PETER STEWARD
03/03/08

Being the first member of the Supporter's Consultative Group to start a regular blog on the fortunes of the Canaries is quite a daunting task.

The problem with such a blog is where to start. What is the blog about? What will it be used for? Hopefully if you are reading this you will be asking the same questions along with others such as who is this bloke and what does he know about football? I feel some kind of explanation is needed.

The idea behind this blog is to give a face to the SCG or Supporters' Consultative Group to give its full title. It is also a blog written by a die-hard Canary fan of over 45 years from the legendary cup run of 1959 to the present day. I have been a Norwich City supporter through thick and thin (and there has certainly been some thick and some thin along the way).

One thing this blog will not be is a marketing tool for the club - far from it. In this blog I will give my opinions on Norwich City. Hopefully over the months ahead it will unfold as the thoughts of a football fan and hopefully it will help you understand a little more about the workings of the SCG.

The blog (or column as I would prefer to call it) will also reminisce on the past, discuss the present and look to the future.

Earlier this season I, like so many others, could see very little future for the Canaries. At that time this blog would probably have been more of a rant than a constructive piece of writing. Now things are different of course. But I am probably getting ahead of myself.

Let me start by telling you a little about the Supporters Consultative Group.

For many the initials SCG will be something of a mystery and that's part of the reason for this blog - to bring it to a wider audience. I have been a member of the strange initials since the dark days, the days when people became ashamed to admit to being a City fan. I am of course talking about last September and October when we were giving a decent impression of 11 headless chickens heading for Division Three. Like so many people of a certain age I refuse to call the third tier of British Football League One, it just doesn't occupy that suggested exalted level in football. It is Division Three pure and simple.

Basically the Consultative Group is a band of supporters that meets regularly with the club's management to discuss a variety of matters. The SCG represents the views of supporters both good and bad (that's the views and not the supporters). Meetings can be forthright and there is certainly no holding back.

The SCG is certainly not a puppet of the club or another arm of the spin doctors. We are not told how to act or what to say. It's as simple as that. We are not paid by the club nor given perks. A number of us have been unhappy with the profile of the group and concerned that nothing was known about it.

So we will be raising the profile of the SCG in various publications over the next few months - but more of that at a later date.

It is my intention to write this blog on a fortnightly basis. Many of the views will be my own but I will also represent comments made to me by fellow supporters. So here goes.

It would have been so much easier to write this blog in the "bad old days" when we were firmly stranded at the bottom of the league. Days when moaning came as second nature and days when I have to admit things got so bad that I almost began to support the opposition. I did this not out of disloyalty but out of the desperate need to see a change in management. That change came about and the rest, as they say, is history.

A special meeting of the SCG was called to meet Glenn Roeder on the night he was appointed. Along with hundreds and maybe even thousands of Canary fans, Roeder wouldn't have been my first choice - that would have been Paul Jewell. On that evening Glenn came over as a very honest man. He answered all our questions and spoke about the difficult job ahead in steering Norwich away from the danger zone. I certainly left the meeting feeling that any position outside the bottom three would be the most we could expect.

Now a few short months later we have been openly talking not about avoiding relegation but about making the play-offs. After the defeat against Blackpool this now seems a dream too far, but it cannot detract from the remarkable success of Roeder's reign to date. It's been a real roller coaster ride so far this season but hopefully now we are beginning to move into calmer waters (if you can imagine the analogy of a roller coaster riding water)

Even now I remember a meeting of the SCG this season when we heard from Director of Sales and Marketing Andrew Cullen about season ticket prices and arrangements for next season and, at that time, the dreaded r word came into play. I thought I would make myself look ridiculous by asking a really stupid question: "What happens if we get promoted?"

There were a few titters around the table, a few strange looks and I'm sure even club chairman Roger Mumby was thinking I had seriously lost it. In fact Andrew seemed to be the only person who didn't think I had lost my marbles. He informed us that the possibility had been considered.

I am certainly no visionary and probably just asked the question in order to get a cheap laugh. So I felt I needed to explain the question.

"Actually I've only asked the question to give you a laugh. If I'm totally wrong you will just laugh me off as an imbecile. If however I'm right you'll remember this moment."

For a time my cheap laugh began to turn into something much more serious and the point is that now we are going in the right direction the thought of promotion could eventually become a reality (if not this season, then sometime in the not too distant future). That idea seemed farcical a few months ago.

I use this example purely to illustrate how optimism has slowly replaced pessimism in the minds of fans.

I think the most telling comment to date came from Glenn Roeder after the Cardiff away match when he told Radio Norfolk that he was glad that he and the players had begun to put the smile back on the faces of supporters. The way he's been going we could all soon be laughing all the way to the bank.

So that's just a few comments for the start of this blog. Over the coming months I will be looking at some of the issues affecting fans and developing a number of themes. If you enjoy reading this column or want to make comments on it please leave a message on the club's bulletin board.