The overriding feeling at Ewood Park was that Norwich City had missed a trick and not just because they failed to turn a 1-0 lead into three precious points in the play-off push.

The Canaries did manage to keep the Championship’s top scorer quiet. Blackburn Rovers’ Sammie Szmodics has 18 league goals this season. An impressive haul of FA Cup goals has swelled his tally to 23 for the campaign already.

Two of those came at Carrow Road in November. His quality was there for all to see as Rovers swept aside a beleaguered Norwich City to leave them 17th in the table.

Szmodics joined Blackburn Rovers for less than £2 million in the summer of 2022. A real snip when compared to some of the eye-watering transfer fees forked out by Norwich City in recent years for players who haven’t proved value for money.

Officially Rovers paid an ‘undisclosed’ amount for him. Helpfully the selling club, Peterborough United, have an owner in Darragh MacAnthony who doesn’t mind sharing. It was “£1.8 million plus add-ons” after having four previous bids rejected.

This is what seems most irksome from a Norwich City point of view. He was playing for Peterborough United! Right there on our doorstep. It’s even more galling when you realise he’s spent the majority of his career in East Anglia having started with Colchester United.

The world of football has got much smaller in recent years. There is no end of data about players from all around the globe available to vast recruitment teams employed by clubs to find a golden needle in the haystack of mediocrity.

Perhaps this is a hopelessly old-fashioned viewpoint but if only they’d opened another tab on their super computers behind the scenes at Carrow Road and put ‘London Road’ into Google Maps.

There are no guarantees Szmodics would have looked as good in yellow and green or hit such a rich vein of form. All signings are a gamble to a greater or lesser extent. It’s just that bringing in promising stars from other East Anglian clubs has worked wonders for Norwich City over the years.

Duncan Forbes joined from Colchester, Adam Drury and Leon McKenzie were plucked from Posh while, more recently, Max Aarons and Jamal Lewis caught the eye while in Luton Town’s youth ranks. There have been many others too.

Luton are included in this because I am basing my version of the region on teams that were covered on Anglia TV’s highlight shows when I was growing up in the 1990s. Before the internet it was a way of keeping in touch with the promising stars of other clubs in the area.

Gerry Harrison was not just the commentator but also our chief scout, shining a light on the talent that could follow a well-trodden path up the football ladder to the bright lights of Norfolk.

There was disappointment for me and my mates when a mesmerising winger called Ricky Otto left Southend United to join Birmingham City in 1994. He looked brilliant on Anglia TV’s goals round-ups. Otto is now working in the midlands as a pastor and probation officer and has quite a story to tell.

Peterborough’s top scorer this season, Ephron Mason-Clark, got the winner against their rivals Cambridge United on Saturday. He’s been loaned back to Posh having signed for Coventry City at the end of the most recent transfer window. Will he be the next Sammie Szmodics in the Championship? Time will tell.

Norwich City will have to cut their cloth accordingly if they are not promoted this season and the Premier League parachute payments float off into the distance. Building a successful squad will be a challenge but it’s one that shouldn’t be written off as impossible.

Many of the club’s biggest heroes are those that have been captured on the cheap, on the way up. Having huge money to spend on transfers has rarely reaped rewards.

It’s less a case of casting the yellow and green net wide and more of casting it in the right places. Or just ask Gerry Harrison.

Like London buses…

You wait ages for one and then two come along at once.

It’s tempting to say that Norwich City scoring direct free-kicks is like London buses. That’s not correct though, Transport For London would be keen to point out that their vehicles get driven straight into walls less often than Canary set-pieces.

Having both Gabriel Sara and Marcelino Nunez in fine free-kick form could be a real asset for David Wagner. With both players standing over the ball at Ewood Park it was clear that Blackburn goalkeeper Aynsley Pears wasn’t sure what to set his defence up for.

By standing to the left-hand side of his goal in anticipation of another Sara special he left the opposite corner open for an expert finish from Nunez.

A free-kick on the edge of the penalty area is always a challenge on commentary. How to build the tension to just the right levels? There is always a chance that something special is about to occur.

Instinctively it’s time to move to the edge of your seat in the press box. Whoever takes the kick might ‘Vrancic’ it into the top corner and spark scenes of great joy in the stands. In reality though they very rarely lead to a goal and go high enough to clear several London buses.

I wonder how many times I must have ramped up the anticipation by describing the ball being placed carefully, 25-yards out and a Norwich City player calculating his run-up?

It’s hard not to feel like a letdown when you have to end the sentence with the most anticlimactic words in the football lexicon: “…and it’s gone straight into the wall.”