Daniel Farke deserved one final hurrah. One final orchestrated moment with the travelling support, after Norwich City finally won a Premier League game.

All that emotion, all that elation, all that weight lifted from the shoulders of him and his players after grimly repelling Brentford in a second half that must have felt like an eternity.

If Farke knew what fate would befall him on his return to a euphoric away dressing room he would never have wanted this game to end.

Stuart Webber, and by definition, the City board had decided time was up. After the manner of an insipid defeat to Leeds the only question was when, not if.

But the end was brutal. The end was swift. Webber headed to the away dressing room to dissolve a partnership which had brought two Championship titles, a talent pipeline which kept the club afloat and weathered the financial fallout from a pandemic, and served up some of the most thrilling football seen by a modern Norwich team.

You can rightly question the manner the dagger was twisted.

For Farke to celebrate with his players and away fans before undertaking media duties, while oblivious to what was in store, marked a shoddy end to his Carrow Road tenure.

There will be those who argued he was on borrowed time, that he was not up to the task in the Premier League and that he had not extracted the most from ample resource.

But the timing of the decision in the afterglow of that top flight win he craved felt a cruel final act.

Webber has now embarked on a search for his successor. His own future will officially be resolved later this month. It has been known for weeks. The sporting director will be here beyond the end of his current deal in 2022.

Who is in the dug out is of far greater importance at present.

The net has been cast wide. The groundwork already done. The usual suspects can be discounted. There is no hard or fast preference for a clone of Farke, or even another foray to foreign fields. For all Norwich’s struggles at the wrong end of the Premier League this remains an attractive proposition.

Webber’s phone will be hot in the days ahead with all manner of middle men and agents touting their clients. But there is a confidence the vacancy will be filled ahead of Southampton’s Premier League visit the other side of this international pause.

Whoever is unveiled has big shoes to fill.

The class act from North Rhine-Westphalia, who bled yellow and green and discovered a second home in Norfolk, is gone.

Even Farke’s harshest critics would surely not dispute he left Norwich in a better state than the wreck he inherited. Only on Friday he bullishly declared his first season was tougher than the growing focus on his own job status; an ageing squad, a club in a parlous financial state burdened by the weight of expectation from bouncing between the top two tiers.

His legacy should not be tainted by struggles in the Premier League.

Webber himself admitted he failed to back Farke first time around in the transfer market. Those ‘sins of the past’ remained a blight on the here and now two seasons ago.

His successor will inherit a squad packed with internationals and fresh talent. There are no financial clouds, despite the on going impact of the pandemic on the balance sheet, and the infrastructure at Colney is light years away from the tired facade that frankly was an embarrassment for a club with pretensions to establish itself in the Premier League.

Farke, and his closest coaching aides, should leave with the warmest of wishes.

His track record will ensure he is a valuable commodity – in all probability back in the Bundesliga after a spell to lick his wounds in Germany. One hopes the bruises fade quickly from a sacking which, with hindsight, was inevitable once Webber’s clarion call pre-Leeds failed to produce the desired effect.

Why the tipping point only came in the wake of a spirited, battling victory at Brentford may remain one of the hidden mysteries of this final, sad chapter in an uplifting story which swept up Norwich fans and transported them on an unforgettable ride of dashing football and attacking verve.

The manner of how it unravelled against Leeds last Sunday suggested Farke had lost his way.

In his quest for defensive resolution he appeared to abandon the principles that had brought so much success. But there appeared enlightenment in the manner he then identified the need to re-discover Norwich’s DNA prior to his Brentford swansong.

There was even tantalising glimpses in the clinical manner of Norwich’s first half goals on Saturday, but the second half was a grim, backs-to-the-wall effort.

Yet even such toil and sweat, and a communal sense of togetherness on the park, illustrated this was a set of players who, by and large, were still behind their head coach.

Farke’s stubborn refusal to utilise either Todd Cantwell or Billy Gilmour were threads that with each passing week became ever more frayed, compounded by a downward spiral in results that highlighted the lack of creativity or control both could have brought.

What next for those two is just one of the fascinating elements to a new chapter under Webber.

But that can wait a little longer.

Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Farke.