Norwich City head coach Dean Smith sat down at Lotus Training Centre on Friday morning for his pre-West Ham United press conference, which you can read every word of here.
On the approach going into West Ham…
“The approach is still to try to win games. That has to be the approach. There’s a lot to play for still. We don’t want to finish bottom and there’s still a possibility of finishing above Watford. With that comes the positivity but also an awful lot of money, which is important to the football club as well to try to get some momentum going into the following season.”
On the likelihood of fringe players starting in the final few games…
“Only if we feel they’re the best team to go and win the game. I’m still of that mindset. We need to go and pick teams that are capable of winning. We’ve got two months to build until the start of next season, which starts at the end of July, so we’ve got plenty of time to look at players rather than in just these games.”
On Todd Cantwell returning from AFC Bournemouth…
“From what I can believe, we haven’t heard from Bournemouth yet. Congratulations to them and Scott Parker for getting promoted up to the Premier League and to Fulham as well. It’s Bournemouth’s choice now whether they want to take up the option with Todd or not. If not, then he comes back home to Norwich.”
On planning for next season…
“It’s a priority now. Yes, the games are important, but there is a priority to make sure we start the season well. The start of the season this year has cost us. You look at the teams that came up last season - ourselves, Watford - who have both struggled, and Brentford, who had a great start to get 12 points out of six or seven games. That’s what you need in this league to give you that confidence and momentum to stay up.”
On lessons learned this season…
“We won’t know yet until we get promoted again. We have to try to get promoted again and that’s the most important thing. Do I believe we’ve got a squad that’s capable of fighting for promotion? Yes. There might be some additions to that and changes, but not wholesale changes. I just feel as a football club that we know the Championship and we know how to get out of it and we’ve got to continue to do what we believe is the right way to get out of that.”
On how much there is to learn in the final games of this season…
“You can learn an awful lot still. There are still principles of play that we’re putting into them from myself, Shakey and Liam. They’re still learning and will continue to learn while we’re learning as well, so it’s a time now where there’s not an awful lot of pressure on the players. They can go and play with freedom and we want to see that in games pretty much all against top half teams now. West Ham have… I feel for them after last night, I’d have loved to have seen them get to the final. David’s a good friend of mine and he’s done unbelievable at West Ham, but we’ll see on Sunday whether it’s a good time to play them or whether they’re smarting.”
On the mood this week…
“I think everybody’s mood has been one of sadness, anger, frustration and disappointment all in one. As a football club, we came up together to try to stay in the league, we haven’t managed to do that and we have to go down together, but the fight is there to make sure that we can come back up again first time.”
On injuries to Kenny McLean and Josh Sargent…
“They’ve both been shut down pretty much for the season now. Kenny’s got a fractured toe so he’ll go in a boot and get that rested and recovered, and Sarge aggravated his ankle as well, so there’s no point risking him for the rest of the season now. Along with Andrew and Adam, they’re shut down for the season, getting ready for pre-season. No surgery is needed for Josh. It will just be a rest period. He trained fully on Friday and was fine. He just aggravated it in his first movements during the game, but we all feel that is was worth the risk, as does Sarge.”
On Christoph Zimmermann’s injury…
“He’ll still be out. He’s got a groin problem I think it is. I think I said hip last week but it’s not, it’s his groin, so he’s still out.”
On the element of frustration following relegation…
“I’ve had those emotions and I addressed all the staff here at Colney, I think it was Tuesday, because I just felt it was important that we have to come in every day and be consistent to make sure that we do the right things and aren’t coming in and having our bottom lips on the ground. We’ve all experienced the same emotions and it’s tough to take but we have to take it and there’s nothing we can do to change it. If ever five minutes summed up our season, then I think the last five minutes of the first half at Villa Park did. If Brandon Williams doesn’t slip over, then Aston Villa probably get booed off at half time. He slips, they score, we don’t get a penalty at the other end, so from what I can make out from the officials now it’s okay to kick somebody in the face, only as long as you’re attempting to kick the ball. I thought Ben Gibson was trying to do that the other day, but I’ve obviously not had the phone call either.”
Setting the tone of the mood moving forward…
“I think I’ve said to you from day one and since I’ve been in management, I learnt it very quickly at Walsall that you can’t be too high or too low. I’ve got a good balance of that. It was disappointing and there was anger in me on Saturday, having got relegated for the first time as a manager, but you have to move on quickly because you’ve got to plan forward. You can’t change what’s happened, but what you can do is learn and improve.”
On whether he watched Bournemouth v Nottingham Forest during the week…
“Yes and no, I watched some of it, but I’m a bit of a football purist, so Liverpool were on against Villarreal at the same time, so there was a bit of flicking both ways to be honest. The Man City game was some game and I’m so disappointed for Man City and Pep and Jack, who I know very well. They looked comfortable and, again, it’s football isn’t it? Those fine margins - Courtois’ studs deflect a goal bound effort and within three minutes the whole match has changed.”
On the status of our players who are in on loan…
“We have them until the end of the season. They’ll be available for selection as well. I said it last week, I think it’s folly to think that you’re not going to include them. This is a strong Premier League, we’re playing four teams that are in the top half of the Premier League and we don’t want to send any team out that we don’t think can win the game, so we have to send our best team out and if that includes loans then it includes loans.”
On transfer rumours surrounding Teemu Pukki…
“I envisage Teemu Pukki kicking off the season with Norwich City next season.”
On devoting time to summer recruitment…
“Over the last month or two, I’ve had a number of sit downs with Stuart, Neil and Lee, as well as my coaching staff and we’ve gone through possible targets for both plan A and plan B. We’ve got a squad audit next week as well, so that’s been a continual process and one that will continue for next season.”
On being proactive early in the window…
“As I said before, we’ve got a pretty settled squad. We’ve only got one player out of contract. We’ve got Todd, which we’ve spoken about, who Bournemouth have an option on. Other than that, we’re pretty solid as a squad. I’ve got some loan players coming back. Three of them will join in training with us next week as well in Jordan Hugill, Sam McCallum and Onel Hernández. They’re going to come and join in with us next week as well. We’ve got quite a healthy squad. We have to remember during the summer we’re going to have a number of players out playing international football, so they won’t report for pre-season until a little bit later than the others, so we’re going to need some of those loan players to have a good look at them at the start of pre-season.”
On being hands on with transfers…
“First and foremost, when I agreed to come in here I sat down with Stuart and he spoke about a style of play, what I like to play and whether it fits in with the model that Stuart likes as well. Obviously it does, otherwise I wouldn’t be sat here. Around that style of play, it’s giving profiles of players in each position for that style of play, and then it’s down to Stuart and the recruitment team to come up with players that fit that model. Then we sit down and discuss the players.”
On January’s game against West Ham…
“They’re a strong team. I was at Aston Villa against them two years ago fighting relegation and to see them become a top eight team in the Premier League is down to the work of David Moyes but you look at the squad that they’ve got, they’re athletes, they’re good at set-pieces both defensively and offensively. They’ve got some fantastic players and you only have to look at Declan Rice to see one of the outstanding players in the Premier League. It’s always going to be a challenge competing agains the likes of West Ham, but I actually thought we played quite well that night. The difference is always going to be in both boxes.”
On players coming back from loans…
“There are a few who have done well. Sinani is in the play-offs with Huddersfield and he’s done really well there. Onel’s had a stop-start time at Middlesbrough but Birmingham really like him and he’s gone there and done really well, although I think he was playing left wing-back and left back at times. I’ve been to watch Sam McCallum play for QPR. Jordan, I’ve kept in touch regularly with him. Andrew Hughes has presented a loans meeting to us a number of times just to keep tabs on the players out there.”
On people linking Norwich to players from Aston Villa…
“We’re looking at players from everywhere, but people will add up two and two and come up with five a lot of the time. We’re not going to be telling people who we’re looking at or who we want to bring in, but if you read it, it’s probably agent-led.”
On West Ham going into this game after playing on Thursday night…
“I would pretty much expect some changes. They’ve had a real fixture congestion and they’ve had a lot of games in a short space of time and some real high profile matches in that as well, so there’ll be some changes I would’ve thought from their team. They’re a really strong team and we’ve got to make sure that we keep the ball and make them work very hard, but again we go back to the two boxes. We’ve got to be really good defensively at set-pieces, because they’re one of the strongest in the league, and we’ve got to make the most of our chances.”
On whether it’s been difficult to think about next season during this season…
“No, because you have to be planning for both, so it’s not difficult. I think my first season in the Premier League with Villa was the same, thinking about both because there was a possibility we could get relegated that year, so you’ve got to plan for the Premier League as well as the Championship, but we’ve got a squad that are capable of competing in the Championship. There’s no doubt about that, they’ve proven it.”
On wanting the players to get more stuck in…
“The culture here will be ever evolving. Myself, going into my first season as a new head coach in a new pre-season, the culture of what I want I can bring into the football club, as I have been. I have to live that culture and there are certain non-negotiables that the players will know already that they have to be and I want them to be. I have to live those values as well and I will do, so I’m looking forward to going into pre-season and putting my stamp on certainly the style of play and how I want us to be. I didn’t talk about a culture of losing at all, it was just that I wanted to see a bit more anger and drive in the players when we were losing and competing a bit more than we did against Newcastle in that game.”
On planning to come straight back up again…
“That’s what the plan is, but the difference will be that there are fans in the stadiums now, which I’m looking forward to. I said when I first came here that we have to make Carrow Road into a real tough place for teams to come. At times, we’ve been labelled as nice to play against and it’s been good games of football. I spoke to Harry Maguire after we played Manchester United and he said it was a good game of football that could have been 5-5. I don’t really want to hear that from the opposition players when they play against us. I want to hear ‘you were tough to play against’ and that’s what we want to get into our squad.”
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