Ian MacNicol/Getty ImagesNorwich City manager Chris Hughton and the club's executives have gotten a thumbs-up this season from supporters.

It might appear an incidental facet of a successful Premier League football club, but do not underestimate the power of unity.

Norwich City have it in abundance, along with a talented squad and a streetwise coaching team around Chris Hughton. Events this week at Chelsea, and now QPR, would suggest deep ruptures exist at those respective outposts from dressing room to boardroom.

When the Canaries speak, it is one voice. Never was that truer than in the past 24 hours when manager, chief executive and chairman all remained firmly on message when it came to City's general thrust in January's transfer window.

Norwich's recent upturn in fortunes, six unbeaten in all competitions ahead of this weekend's Premier League trip to Everton, suggest the club can approach the annual New Year scramble with a modicum of restraint. Hughton does not need to perform wholesale surgery on a squad which is now delivering on the promise displayed last season when they defied the majority of expectations to comfortably survive.

Hughton has made it clear that striking reinforcements will be the priority to embellish a defensive mindset which has achieved three consecutive clean sheets during November. Robbie Keane and Swansea's Danny Graham are the latest to be added to a speculative list which already contained Maribor's Robert Beric, Stoke's Cameron Jerome and Arsenal's Marouane Chamakh. You can cross that last one off straight away unless the Moroccan is ready to take a huge wage cut to fit in with a tighter fiscal policy operated at Carrow Road, in contrast to the Emirates.

You could put all those names and more to Hughton between now and the actual opening of the window. The response will be the same; City do their business behind closed doors. Speculation is part of the fun for the media and the supporters, but Hughton is too canny an operator to add to it. But he was more forthcoming on potential outs when I pushed him at his Everton pre-match press call on Thursday.

Norwich's inevitable improvement in the shadow of the next transfer window generates a cloud to the silver lining. With each clean sheet, each unbeaten game, each place climbed up the Premier League rankings, City's squad see their own personal stock soar. Wes Hoolahan and John Ruddy have both been linked with surprise moves elsewhere over the past days. Both have risen to the international arena this season; carried along on Norwich's surge from League One to becoming a genuine Premier League mainstay. In Hoolahan's case, a contract with 18 months and counting to run has fuelled recent speculation the Dubliner may seek a move to pastures new.

Hughton was categorical this week. No approaches have been made for any of his stars. You suspect any that do materialise will get a sharp rebuke. That much was clear later on Thursday night at the club's annual meeting, when chairman Alan Bowkett reiterated Norwich is now a buying club when City's hierarchy formally presented record figures relating to the first tranche of Premier League riches banked last season. Further, no player has been sold over the past three years against the club's wishes. Players and their representatives inside the game know you do not try and hold the Canaries to ransom. Brinkmanship is not a tactic that will carry any weight with the club's astute chief executive, David McNally.

Yet, with each new peak scaled by Hughton and his squad, expect that defiant tone to tested in the future. For Norwich, to not only survive but prosper, they will have to pitch for the higher-profile, higher-earning players. That is the law of the football jungle. Consolidation is not really an option when some of your rivals are prepared to dismiss managers and trade players with frightening regularity.

But the sense of a club singing from the same hymn sheet works wonders for supporters who see and hear the speculation and the incessant 24/7 thirst for fresh news and angles. Norwich's slide into the third tier in 2009 signalled the nadir of a period of friction between board and terrace over their spiralling decline. Since then, bridges have been re-built. It will take more than gathering transfer speculation to fracture that alliance.

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