Alan Neilson: We need to be more ruthless

On a cold evening at Carrow Road, the home support were treated to a six-goal thriller by the young Canaries.

It’s certainly never dull watching City’s development squad at the moment – they’ve now scored 27 and conceded 25 across their eleven Premier League 2 fixtures.

U23s lead coach Neilson said afterwards: “It was a good result. We made an excellent start with plenty of runs in behind their defence.

“We got the three early goals and we obviously knew they were going to come back into the game. We took our foot off the accelerator a little bit and we spoke at half-time about doing what the first-team did to Huddersfield last year.

“But it didn’t quite work out like that. We need to learn to stop giving teams chances.

“I always want more from them. We gave the ball away sloppily when we were 3-0 up. We could have gone four or five ahead but we let them back into the game.”

With a busy period coming up, Neilson is happy to see some of his injured players returning to the fold.

“We’ve got players coming back from injury and they’re getting more minutes so that’s a positive.

“We have to learn. We are a young team and they’ll learn that when you’re 3-0 up, you’ve got to keep pushing for more.

“Our next two games are Friday and then a Sunday so it’ll be good to have some players back for those games.

“We’ve got a few days off with the international break but we’ll be back when the first-team are back in and we’ll be ready to get to work.”