Norwich City head coach Dean Smith saw his side make too many mistake against the league leaders in Saturday night’s 4-0 defeat at home to Manchester City.
“The defeat was deserved,” he told canaries.co.uk. “Manchester City are a better team than us and proved it today. If we’d have got beat 6-0 and they opened us up and scored really good goals, I can hold my hands up because of the quality they have, but the manner of the goals frustrates me and annoys me because it’s something that we’ve been so good about.
“The first one is a mistake that can happen, so we can get over that and we stayed in the game in the first half. The second goal, we’d just talked about it at half time if they were getting runners down the side and we allowed the ball to go under us and they get a tap-in. It killed the atmosphere, to be honest. It looked like it flattened us a little bit.
“We didn’t defend set-pieces well enough all night and it was more the second phase when they reversed it back that we never competed well enough. They got some big chances from that. The fourth goal… I don’t know. The referee’s made a decision that frankly I told him was pathetic, just two players ran into each other. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter to the officials. It hurts us because four is worse than three, but let’s be honest, it’s never a penalty.
“We had moments in the game, certainly from set-pieces, which we felt we could hurt them on. Grant’s hit the post on a second phase but we’ve won a lot of first contacts from set-pieces and we connected a few times really well when we won the ball back and released Teemu or Milot and got some chances, but they were few and far between against an excellent team.”
Man City appeared to target Norwich’s right hand side during the first half, which came as little surprise to Smith.
“They do that to everybody, looking to overload you and switch the ball quickly,” he said. “\[Ilkay\] Gundogan runs from deep and makes little runs down the side of the centre-halfs and that’s where we can’t be prescriptive in terms of what we’re going to do against top players and top teams, that’s where sometimes players have to make really good football decisions and certainly I didn’t think we did that in our penalty box as we have been doing for the last five weeks.”
What the scoreline doesn’t show is that Norwich had a number of promising moments in attack throughout the first half, including Grant Hanley’s header onto the post.
“There were some positive elements and I’ve said that to the players,” Smith added. “We all know how good Man City are, but we felt we could hurt them and there were periods when we did. I was pleased that we got in at 1-0 at half-time and albeit being being a mistake, I felt that if we hung in the game then we would get a chance, but unfortunately that second goal killed the game.”
“Our season won’t be defined by playing against Man City, as not a lot of other team’s seasons will be as well. We went into the game believing we could hurt and upset them but we also knew that we couldn’t make many mistakes and we did tonight, so that has cost us. We’ll regroup and get ready for Liverpool and make sure that we limit those mistakes against them.”
Lastly, Smith clarified why Adam Idah wasn’t included in the matchday squad.
“He had to go for a scan yesterday as he was getting ankle and knee pain,” he said. “I didn’t know before my press conference, so you can excuse me for that, but we’ll find out how he is and get back to you.”