There’s a cracking game of Championship chicken and egg developing and David Wagner is at the centre of it.

A fascinating divide has emerged in the table. All of the top 11 teams from Leicester City down to Cardiff City have the same manager in charge as they did on the opening day of the season. Every single club below that line has changed at least once.

It feels like an unusual situation at such a late stage of the campaign in a division which is notorious for giving managers a short shelf life.

Is this conclusive proof that patience pays off and trusting the process is better than knee jerking your way through the autumn and winter months? Probably not. It does though beg a philosophical footballing question: are Norwich City in the top six because they stood by David Wagner or is Wagner still in a job because the Canaries are in the play-off places?

You can apply versions of the same question to any of those top 11 clubs.

Birmingham and Sunderland fans are among those casting an envious eye in the direction of Carrow Road. When John Eustace was sacked by the Blues on October 9 for not being as famous as Wayne Rooney they were sixth in the table, albeit after just 11 games.

They are now in the bottom three and their Championship status could well be on the line when Norwich go to St Andrews on the final day. Sunderland were ninth, three points outside the play-offs, when Tony Mowbray was shown the door in early December. They are now 13th and a full 15 points shy of the top six having subsequently appointed and sacked Michael Beale.

On the other hand, QPR supporters and those who follow Norwich’s next opponents, Sheffield Wednesday, are bound to be advocates for change. Both looked doomed to relegation in the opening months of the campaign. The battle is still ongoing, particularly for Wednesday, but with much more belief of a positive outcome.

It would be interesting to know what the discussions were behind the scenes at Carrow Road back on November 5. The last time City lost at home, 3-1 to Blackburn, and slumped to 17th in the Championship.

Since then Wagner has overseen a remarkable turnaround. From 26 games Norwich have taken 50 points. In the same time frame only Leeds (58 from 26) and Ipswich (52 from 27) have won more.

The atmosphere around Carrow Road on derby day suggested that Wagner has achieved what seemed impossible and completely changed public perception of himself and his abilities to get the best out of the current City squad.

It's worth taking a step back and looking at what the head coach has achieved in 15 months in charge. The squad he inherited from Dean Smith was in underwhelming form.

The Pink Un: Norwich City fans revel in their victory over Ipswich Town

It was always going to be a challenge, if it wasn’t a difficult situation there probably wouldn’t have been a job available for him to take. Teemu Pukki knew he was going, Max Aarons, Andrew Omobamidele and Tim Krul were in the last knockings of their Canary careers.

Add in a serious injury from which Grant Hanley still hasn’t fully recovered and an awful lot of Norwich City knowhow all disappeared at the same time.

With a single summer transfer window and a limited budget to plug all of those gaps and somehow improve the squad a top six finish looked the very best that Norwich City could possibly hope for at the start of the season. 

Wagner oversaw that run of one win in 10 through the autumn. Even allowing for the injury issues the performances were alarming at the time. He was also in charge of a team that didn’t score any goals at home after February last season. That’s why there were doubts.

It wouldn’t have felt controversial if he had gone in November and yet it’s hard to make a case for a replacement doing any better than what has transpired. Wagner was able to pull his entire squad together on the pitch on Saturday celebrating an 8th straight home win, an East Anglian derby success and being in the play-offs with just five games to go.

Norwich’s closest rivals for the final play-off place are Coventry. They were 20th back on November 5 under Mark Robins. Perhaps keeping calm and carrying on is sometimes good advice.

Form book…

The latest East Anglian derby was one to prove the old adage that games like that send ‘the form book out of the window’.

Josh Sargent played in a league game at Carrow Road and didn’t score for the first time since the opening day of the season. Free-scoring Ipswich Town, so impressive over the previous 40 matches, barely tested Angus Gunn.

The one constant was Norwich City extending their unbeaten run in the fixture to 14 games and 15 years. That proud record has somehow made the run up to derby day all the more tense for Canaries fans. Every time one comes around there is an extra layer of nerves about whether this will finally mark the end of a long yellow and green line.

There is every chance the two great rivals might now meet again in the play-offs. That’s not to take a top six place for Norwich City for granted. Neither is it writing off Ipswich’s chances of automatic promotion. Town have been so good this season that they absolutely could still do it.

It would at least spare Norwich fans the almost unbearable tension of a two-legged play-off derby.

There would be a nagging feeling that Ipswich couldn’t possibly play as poorly again. Having said that, if not a derby,  a sixth place finish would almost certainly mean having to clash with one of Daniel Farke’s Leeds United or Leicester City.

This form book may need to be thrown out of a couple of other windows before the end of May for Norwich City’s campaign to get its dream conclusion.