David Wagner: Players deserve all the credit for Norwich’s turnaround

Posted Sunday, December 24, 2023 by PA

Norwich head coach David Wagner praised his players for turning their season around after watching them record a comfortable 2-0 win over his former club Huddersfield at Carrow Road.

A poor run of form in the autumn had seen the Canaries slip into the bottom half of the Championship, but they have now won five games from eight to move to within two points of the play-off places.

Their latest success came courtesy of second-half goals from Sam McCallum and Borja Sainz.

Wagner said: “The players deserve all the credit for the way they reacted to that bad run.

“They went through a difficult spell but they stood together, kept their heads up and never felt sorry for themselves.

“They said ‘we are better than this, we can do better than this’ and have put together a good run to get us back up the table.

“Now we have players coming back and the challenge is to keep this going, keep delivering, like we did today.

“I thought this was another good step in the right direction – a good result, a clean sheet and also a good overall performance, which I was also pleased about.

“Sometimes when opponents sit so deep you can get frustrated when the goals don’t come early but we stuck at it and once we scored early in the second half I thought we controlled the game. We created a lot of opportunities and could have scored more goals.”

The Canaries took a deserved lead 90 seconds into the second half as half-time substitute McCallum headed in his first goal for the club.

Sainz curled in a second with 17 minutes left.

A disappointing Huddersfield side failed to register an effort on goal until the 87th minute, when the outcome had long since been decided.

Manager Darren Moore felt his side were punished for a couple of lapses in concentration.

“We had defended well in the first half, while we also had a good impetus in the game for a while, but we switched off a couple of times for their goals which is disappointing,” he said.

“For the first goal it was second phase from a corner and they put in a good cross which the lad has headed in. We needed to be concentrating better then because you never like conceding goals like that from set pieces.

“It was a similar story with the second goal and you cannot afford that against a good side like Norwich.

“I am certainly not complaining about the effort the lads put in today and there were times when he had the ball and got into some promising positions.

“When we get there we need to be more determined, arrogant if you like, to make more of our chances.”