A quiet start to the season?

By Glenn Speller
BBC Essex sports producer

Lambert joined Norwich days after his U's beat them 7-1

If there is one thing you can say about this job it is that there is never a dull day.

There we were just looking to ease ourselves into another campaign quietly when all of a sudden it was all hands to the pump.

No doubt the biggest story has been the departure of Colchester manager Paul Lambert to Norwich.

I was getting out of a swimming pool with my four-year-old just before 10am on Tuesday to find a lot of missed calls on my mobile and several voicemails. To say I was shocked would be an understatement but on reflection that shock has dissipated somewhat and it does now all make sense.

What we have to understand about Paul Lambert is, he is a man in a hurry. He lasted two years at Wycombe where failure in the play-offs led to him walking away.

When he arrived at Colchester he was not in the mood for messing around. His first job was to save them from relegation and then build a side capable of mounting a promotion challenge.

Lambert never held back in criticising those players he felt were not pulling their weight and went out to win every game, losing is not something he accepted. That is hardly surprising from a man who has won almost everything in the game, including the Champions League.

606: DEBATE

Burley, Parkinson, Lambert - who do you hate more?

Paolo of Essex

The second thing to understand is how well Lambert and the Norwich chief executive David McNally get on. They were together at Celtic and maybe that is why the Norfolk club did not feel the need to officially interview him but rather just ask Colchester for permission to appoint him, unless of course something else happened away from gazing eyes, but that would never happen in football would it(!)

Norwich like to portray themselves as a caring, sharing family club - their behaviour in this affair does not exactly give credence to that image and maybe the inability to agree compensation is merely the tip of the iceberg, we shall see.

All of this came just 10 days after Colchester had hammered Norwich 7-1 and yet Lambert still saw more potential at Norwich, and with their big crowds and bigger budgets you can maybe understand that, but it is a gamble. Norwich have dispensed with Bryan Gunn, Glenn Roeder and Peter Grant in quick succession and if it does not work for Lambert, a CV of walking out on two clubs and failure at a third might not have future employers beating his door down.

In the BBC Essex office we thought it was Grays Athletic who were giving us more than enough work, sacking a manager before a ball had been kicked in anger, releasing untold players and signing a whole new team in two days, and then appointing Gary Phillips along with Alan Lewer as their new management team.

The thing about Grays is when interviewing anyone about players who did not feature in a team, the question is not "is he injured?" but normally "is he still with the club?"

Meanwhile Southend and Dagenham & Redbridge are going about their business in a more circumspect manner, at least they were the last time I looked!

You can hear commentary on every Colchester and Southend match on BBC Essex this season.