David Cuffley
Ruthless is not a word one often hears in the same sentence as the name Norwich City, but it's an adjective that sums up just why this team is bang on course for a return to the Championship.
I think we can all agree that last season, for every Norwich City fan, was desperate. Ten months of watching a seemingly irresistible slide into League One seemed to be the affliction for swathes of the campaign, punctuated by cursory glances in the forlorn hope something could spark City into life - or even more fanciful, survival.
This Friday would have been Justin Fashanu's 49th birthday. The prodigiously talented young forward should be remembered for his skills on the pitch and his goals, or in particular, that goal.
A well-known ex-Canary and Evening News columnist asked me before kick-off at Millwall on Saturday if I thought City were about to chalk up yet another win.
Two of Norwich City's promotion heroes from a bygone era have taken great delight in the progress of League One's pacesetters. Exactly half a century after helping City to runners-up spot in Division Three - the last time the club appeared in English football's third flight - former team-mates Terry Allcock and Bill Punton have watched with growing admiration as the present day Canaries have carried all before them in an unbeaten run of 16 matches, 14 of them victories.
If goalkeepers are all supposed to belong to the same union - admittedly a kind of spiritual brotherhood rather than a body likely to be affiliated to the TUC - then how many currently playing have at some time or other been members of the Norwich branch? Trawl through the weekend fixtures and, leaving aside the involvement of Fraser Forster, Declan Rudd and Jed Steer in City's own League One and Academy matches, I can find at least 10 ex-Canary 'keepers on the teamsheets for key games, four of them on FA Cup duty.
Norwich City's season began in record-breaking fashion - in the worst possible way - but in the weeks ahead a whole string of club records could come under threat in a much more positive sense, if the Canaries maintain their League One promotion charge.
Things must be getting pretty serious ahead of Saturday's East Anglian “derby” if Colchester United fans have been asked to report to the ground over the next few days with shovels and wheelbarrows.