Head Coach David Wright has said that the side need to keep working hard to improve their game, particularly outside of possession.
Following Norwich City Under-23s 4-1 loss to West Ham United in the Premier League 2 Division 2 on Friday evening, Wright spoke to canaries.co.uk about the game and how he feels it went.
“They were better than us, so they deserved the win. We started okay, but then as they got their game together and they got their rotations going, they started pulling us out of position and then hurting us. They isolated our full-backs, and as a result we conceded two very similar goals. It’s something that individually and collectively we need to improve on.
“We need to improve on certain defending aspects, like our individual dueling. But its not just the technical bits, its the psychological parts too, being aggressive, not allowing people to dominate us. That’s going to be key for this group moving forward.
“If you look in possession over the past number of weeks, some of the football we’ve played, like the second goal against West Brom, it was outstanding. But that’s not particularly an area we really need to improve in, it’s the stuff out of possession.”
West Ham are currently first in the league, and are the only team to remain undefeated, boasting a record of eight wins and one draw. When asked if that gives any leeway to the Canaries, Wright wrote off any excuses the team could have for taking the loss.
“No, not really, there’s no excuses. We can’t look like that. We’ve got to concentrate on ourselves, a lot of the stuff tonight just wasn’t good enough. We’ve let ourselves down. I really need to look at that and make a plan on how to improve individually and collectively, then the players need to be brave enough to move that forward.”
Even in the case of a loss, the Canaries usually play competitively and put up a good fight, often performing better than the result may reflect, but their performance against West Ham seemed to be lacking that same feeling. When asked why this might be, Wright put it down to small errors building up. He said:
“I think there might have been a bit of confidence issues in there, in terms of results the team haven’t been picking up many points, even though the performances suggest the results should be better. I think it comes back to the fact that at the moment we’re making too many individual errors. We’re making too many collective errors, and it’s something as a group we need to put right.”
"We’ve got to go again. As a group, we’ve got to make sure we get better and better.”