Glory in Excelsior

Airdrie United 2-3 Norwich City

Three goals, three wins and three weeks to go until League One. The excellent Wes Hoolahan opened the scoring with trialists Goran Maric and Jens Berthel-Askou also getting on the scoresheet in the first half at Airdrie's Excelsior Stadium.

I thought I was in with a chance of playing when handed my kit for the afternoon. Most grounds give you a ticket, some a sticker and the posher ones a laminated pass to help you prove your identity to any over-zealous stewards for whom a bag of microphones isn't good enough. At Airdrie they either like you to feel the part to help improve your matchday experience or, and this is much more likely, they are fed up with dishevelled reporters like me spending upto ten minutes at a time rifling through loose change, spare batteries and pocket fluff to locate that press pass.

I looked at the Norwich squad list. No number 22. I was snapped out of a daydream involving landing a playing contract after impressing Bryan Gunn with my ability to put a training tabard on the right way round by the feeling I was being watched. And I was......

The Airdrie owl sits quietly yet threateningly at the back of the press box. Its official duty is to scare pigeons to stop them from nesting (or worse) in the stand between matches. Or so they say. I think it is a clever PR trick. No journalist would be brave enough to write anything anti-Airdrie with those eyes piercing a hole in the back of their blue, numbered tabard.

So that was Scotland. The tour's left me more optimistic about all things Norwich City than when I set out for Dartford a week ago. It had better be cautious optimism though. The past few seasons have left scars too deep to be covered by wins over three teams who, until this week, didn't mean much to me other than a sign that James Alexander Gordon had almost reached the end of his five minutes work for another week.