From the classic ‘You’re not fit to referee’ to a good old-fashioned loud, angry boo. Nothing sets a football crowd off quite like a collective sense of injustice.
The feeling that officials have a personal vendetta against your team comes with the territory. There is an entire playlist of terrace chants devoted to the subject, most of which cannot be repeated in a family publication like this.
It’s much harder to know how to react when an absolute howler goes in your favour.
It was a game which offered encouragement that Johannes Hoff Thorup’s Canaries can look after themselves when the going gets tough as well as play pretty football. The fact that one and probably two of the goals shouldn’t have stood will be a mere footnote.
Josh Sargent did nothing wrong for Sainz’s controversial opener. His valiant attempt to keep the ball in play was so good that it convinced the watching officials that the Pride Park pitch was an extra couple of yards longer than it really is.
Perhaps the referee and his assistants realised they were dealing with an American sportsman. Whether or not a ball is out can be a difficult argument to get out of in those circumstances.
I can just hear Sargent bellowing, “that ball was on the line. Chalk flew up”. As it was, the only cries of, “you cannot be serious” were from the home supporters. At least I think that’s what they were shouting.
To those of a Derby persuasion they had been the victims of one of the great Championship scandals. It was hard not to have some sympathy with those who follow Derby as we waited for the managers to emerge for their post-match interviews.
Even attempts to politely point out that the ball had come back to Sargent off a defender’s hand didn’t seem to carry much weight. It felt like humility was the best approach. I must remember everything I said about these things evening themselves out over the course of a season and the importance of playing to the whistle next time it happens to the Canaries. There will inevitably be something over the coming weeks.
The match is bound to be used as evidence to support the argument that VAR would really help in the Championship. Most fans don’t want that to happen but it does mean that the odd injustice against your team just has to be swallowed.
It’s only six months since Sainz himself was hard done by at Middlesbrough. His red card for tangling with Jonny Howson last season was eventually overturned, but it didn’t help the Canaries on the night as a promising 1-0 lead became a meek 3-1 loss.
City’s Spanish star deserved his moment in the spotlight. With Gabriel Sara and Jonathan Rowe leaving over the summer there was a vacancy for a player with what would best be described as the 'X-Factor’ in the Norwich line-up.
Sara and Rowe commanded big transfer fees because of their ability to create something out of nothing, to score a goal against the run of the play or come up with a piece of magic that cannot be replicated at will on the training ground.
Borja Sainz is becoming the in-house magician at Carrow Road. He needs only one more goal to equal his tally from last season and it’s only just October.
The win at Derby came a year and a day after Sainz’s Norwich debut. He scored that night too, during a cameo off the bench in a League Cup defeat at Premier League Fulham.
There were signs of promise under David Wagner, but it’s amazing how often players really emerge as fully-fledged crowd favourites in their second seasons. Sara got more impressive by the match after an underwhelming start.
If you think back to some of the heroes of the Daniel Farke era, the jury was out on the likes Marco Stiepermann and Mario Vrancic until their second Canary campaigns brought a Championship title and some memorable moments.
Scoring a treble against Derby is a good way of going down in Norwich folklore. On the way back we stopped for fuel on the A14 at Newmarket.
Who was going in to pay for his petrol as we left? Only the actual Simeon Jackson, scorer of the most famous hat-trick in a 3-2 win against Derby.
Fan-tastic
Norwich City’s travelling fanbase is never taken for granted, but even by their standards taking 2,800 to Derby for a Saturday lunchtime kick-off in September was remarkable. I suppose it was 2,801 if you include Derby manager Paul Warne.
Following a fine 4-1 win over Watford with an away support of that magnitude is the surest sign yet that Johannes Hoff Thorup’s ways are being fully bought into. Adding a pulsating away win, including a memorable hat-trick, suggests that the blue touch paper on this season could be lit.
Successive home games this week provide a real opportunity to turn signs of promise into a storming start to the season. Good results over Daniel Farke’s Leeds United this evening and then Hull City on Saturday would really start to lift expectation levels.
However, this is the Championship and getting too confident too soon is a pitfall that has caught many a pundit out before.
Even if this week doesn’t go to plan, look at the difference between the last two Norwich City displays and what they were like on the first day of the season at Oxford. Progress has been made at an alarming rate. Whether it is sustainable only time will tell, but for now it’s fine to embrace the encouragement of the standards set by the team in recent weeks.
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