Norwich City The Seventies

Revisiting a colourful decade for both the City of Norwich and its much loved football team.

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The castle lies at the heart of the city while the cathedral is its soul. But the football club, modest in name yet bright and vibrant with it, is its life. Unlike any other city in England, the day-to-day life of Norwich was, is now, and ever shall be intertwined with the fortunes of its famous football club. Whether in time of crisis or celebration at Carrow Road, the emotions of the club are carried and shared by the people of Norwich. For the first seventy years or so, the Canaries rarely rattled their own cages, let alone those of their rivals. However, barely a year after the appointment of a new bishop to the Diocese of Norwich - a Canaries fan at that - the club rose from sleepy obscurity into the previously unheard-of heights of English football's top flight for the first time. Coincidence or divine intervention, via just a little help from Cathedral Close? It marked the beginning of the Canaries' rise to the big league in more ways than one. The advent of colour television and more widespread coverage of the sport, together with the steady realisation that there was serious money to be made from the game, meant that their promotion came at exactly the right time, a time that is now looked back on by many as a golden era in English football. For both the football club and the historic city that gave it its name, the Seventies was a decade of great change, progress and development as they both made their way, bright-eyed and feathery tailed, towards the fast-approaching millennium.