Elliott Bennett crosses for Grant Holt to open the scoring at The Hawthorns. Picture: Paul Chesterton / Focus Images

That’s probably as good as it gets.

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Not just Saturday’s result, but also yesterday’s fifth-round draw.

Frankly, when Jim Rosenthal and Co began their over-long build-up to the main event I was expecting the worst.

Not a trip to, say, Liverpool or Arsenal, but, on past fifth-round experience, a visit to Everton, a real lose-lose situation.

A highly likely defeat and anything but lucrative in crowd terms, not to mention hardly having the financial consolation of having your tie selected for television coverage.

Yes, we could have maybe drawn Stevenage or Crawley at home, but I’m quite happy to avoid the plucky underdogs. (There’s also the small matter with the latter of having to welcome a manager with, shall we say, a somewhat colourful past.)

Both would relish the chance of taking on Premier League opposition and all the media attention would be on them.

As it is, however, we have yet another low-profile tie which now offers the chance of our first quarter-final place since 1992.

While I’m sure Leicester’s owners wouldn’t turn their noses up at FA Cup progress they haven’t lavished millions of pounds on a series of under-achieving managers and players just for that.

The league remains their priority, and when they come here on February 18 they will surely still feel that they have a chance of the play-offs, on a mathematical if not footballing, basis.

Beating us would be nice, but it surely cannot be their main aim this season.

Surely neither us nor the Foxes have budgeted for a fifth-round place and therefore you’d like to hope that neither will want to cash in with high ticket prices.

Charge the minimum permissible prices and a Carrow Road full house is absolutely guaranteed.

And if we adopt the same approach as we did against Burnley I see absolutely no reason why we can’t make the quarter-finals.

With a lack of midweek fixtures either side of Leicester’s visit we’re hardly going to be bogged down by a fixture build-up.

Paul Lambert ought to be able to put out as strong a side as possible and the efficient way that Burnley were despatched just shows what can happen if you take the FA Cup seriously.

Two quick, straightforward wins and we are starting to build momentum in much the same manner as has been achieved in the league.

You’d have liked two of Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool to have been paired with each other, in order to get another big gun out of the way, but with each passing round we are showing that bit more cup resolve and purpose and really starting to believe in ourselves.

It’s almost as if fortune favours the brave – treat it the right way and this is your reward.

Mess around and you’re just going to get draws like Chelsea and Southampton (the 2003 version, that is) away.

• THIS IS ALREADY LOOKING A TOUGH SEASON TO TOP FOR LAMBERT

You wonder whether at some point over the summer whether Messrs Lambert and Culverhouse will sit down and think: “In each of the last two years we’ve topped the previous season. How on Earth are we going to better 2011/12?”

League survival and now a place in at least the last 16 of the FA Cup – it’ll certainly be some challenge.

I certainly can’t be the only City fan who didn’t expect the latter achievement – and it is an achievement, as anyone who witnessed the defeats to Charlton and Leyton Orient in particular would surely testify. I so fully expected us to fail to get beyond the third-round stage that I had long since arranged something else for the weekend just gone rather than embark upon a quick return visit to The Hawthorns.

It’s all too easy to overlook how three successive away wins over Premier League opposition is a simply outstanding achievement, but such is the way things are at Carrow Road at the moment the danger is that it just gets totally overlooked; it’s just the way of things.

If there’s one quality for me that has been the difference between this Premier League campaign and the other one it’s the Canaries’ approach – never mind results – on the road.

Different tactics, different line-ups, the positive results just keep on coming.

Saturday’s team being a case in point – just look at the number of former League One stalwarts on show at The Hawthorns.

I don’t doubt that ITV have played a significant part in the Canaries’ FA Cup exploits.

Had they not decided to screen Sunderland’s draw against Middlesbrough yesterday and our visit to Wearside had still been tomorrow night, I imagine that all the focus would have been on the league points.

(As a result you can almost forgive ITV and their ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ coverage of our win at The Hawthorns.)

That extra day makes all the difference. Perhaps we might not get anything out of our visit to the Stadium of Light – even allowing for their exertions against Middlesbrough yesterday – but the hard-won point against Chelsea would make up for any failings there. And besides, if there’s one fixture to be won this week it’s surely against Bolton.

Victory over them, Wigan and Wolves and that would surely be that as far as league survival goes.

In taking things one game at a time the next Lambert target must now be an FA Cup quarter-final place – a landmark which Messrs Walker, Rioch, Hamilton, Worthington, Grant and Roeder were all unable to, or not in a position to, record.

But in the meantime it is almost as if he has managed something that none of his predecessors could achieve - the ability to influence the FA Cup gods to give us a decent draw.

• REBUILDING OF OLD TRADITION

A bit of a cup first on Saturday, then.

I may be wrong, but I believe that the fourth-round victory at West Bromwich was the first time that the Canaries have beaten a top-division club in a cup competition since they saw off Bolton on penalties in the fourth round of the League Cup in 1995, at a time when Martin O‘Neill had just quit as manager. Yes, it was that long ago.

In terms of actually defeating a team at the first time of asking you may have to go back to the win over Coventry in the 1993 FA Cup third round.

At a stroke Paul Lambert has now overseen as many FA Cup wins over league opposition over the last month as the Canaries managed in the entire preceding 14 seasons.

Hark, is that the sound I hear of a cup reputation just starting to be slowly rebuilt?

• TIME TO KEEP QUIET, CONNOR

I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that we will hear a lot less from Connor Wickham in the run-up to Wednesday night’s match at Sunderland than in the past.

Think back to last September and before the visit of Steve Bruce’s Black Cats, the former Ipswich starlet declared of Norwich: “I want to go back and hurt them. You‘re going to get stick, but that‘s football. I want to make the fans go quiet.”

Given that Martin O’Neill’s Sunderland are now managed by a much more wily operator I imagine that his views in the build-up to Wednesday night can best be summed up as follows: “..”