Norwich City Boss Makes Vital Canaries Squad Makeover Ahead Of Summer Window

Ryan Hardie was the latest Championship forward to profit from charitable defending with a five minute brace at Home Park on Saturday, before Josh Sargent’s 14th league goal of the season.

Thorup had previously indicated he expects another busy summer makeover to turn the Canaries into genuine top six contenders. City also have a number of players soon to be out of contract.

“There will be tough positions taken after this season. That’s how it is,” he said. “100pc. We need to improve as a team and find the right structure and the right fit, player-wise. That’s how it is in this game, because our way going forward is to play like we wanted to play at Plymouth.

“But the way going forward for us is to be that offensive-minded team who score goals, who create chances, who develop young players, who develop offensive players again.

“To make it perfectly clear, it’s not the way we played against West Brom the other day. That’s not the way. That’s something you can do once in a while, and it can also happen next season, that we do it once in a while to make sure that we get a result and make sure that we are more compact in the game.

“We sit and talk about another poor result, and a mid-table position, yet we still have the top goal scorer of the league and Sarge is two or three behind on that list. That’s our ambition, that we create offensive players who can become good for us and then take the next step in their career.

“We have to create young players, and we have to do it within a certain style that delivers a lot of chances in a game, that delivers a lot of goals.”

“I am (frustrated) because the goals are too easy goals. We can see it,” said Thorup. “Let them play around us and I will be the first one to applaud it and say, ‘Okay, fair enough. They scored a goal where they passed it in between us, down the side of us and around us, and they created an open chance, and they scored a goal. Fair enough.’

“But it’s not the case. It’s from all those moments where we have to compete better, we have to do more and when we cannot think about how good we can be on the ball or the next situation, before we have solved the first one we face. It seems like we are too eager to get to the next one instead of just solving the moment properly.

“We spoke so much about this before the (Plymouth) game, where there will be moments because they deliver crosses from all over the pitch, moments where we have to fight for the first contact and the second and the third, and stay in our positions and keep the defensive set piece structure until the situation is over, and then we can start playing again.

“But it seems like we were not sticking well enough to it, and not long enough to it, because look at where it comes from their first goal. It’s a mess of a situation. The second goal is from our throw-in.”