After Norwich City Under-23s were held to a 0-0 draw at home to Burnley U23s on Friday, head coach David Wright felt his side were unable to get out of second gear.
“We’re disappointed,” he told canaries.co.uk “I’m not quite sure we ever got going. It just felt like we were waiting for someone else to take the responsibility. That can’t be the case, right from the first minute.
“The lads have got a really good understanding of how we want to play. The reason I know that is because they’ve shown that over a number of months now.”
City had never played Burnley before, due to the Clarets’ recently acquired Category One academy status, but that’s no excuse, as far as Wright’s concerned.
“We don’t play the badge, just the formation that’s in front of us,” he said. “They banked up in a 4-4-2 and we actually found it really difficult to play through.
“Only very few times did we play the way that we wanted to play and ended up getting into their back four quite quickly, but that was very rare.”
Centre-back Jaden Warner, who came on as a half-time substitute, was only able to play ten minutes before being forced off with a hip injury, requiring midfielder Zach Dronfield to drop into the back four.
“Zach’s played centre-half a few times,” Wright added. “We went to Man United a couple of years ago and he played a full game there.
“He’s intelligent enough to understand how to play quite a number of positions, which is good for him.”
Burnley had a great chance to take the lead late on, Jon McCracken giving a penalty away and then saving the subsequent spot-kick to keep the scores at 0-0.
“It was a good save in the end, Wright said. “We’ll have to have a little look at how the penalty came about. It took quite a while for the referee to let the lad take the penalty, so I’m not sure if that came into his head, but in the end Jon saved it and released us on the counter-attack.”