Norwich City manager Alex Neil was delighted with the way that his players fulfilled their roles yesterday as a change in tactics for the Scotsman saw his third Premier League win with Norwich this season against Swansea.
Norwich sat back and let Swansea have control of the ball, not something they have done often to opposition sides at Carrow Road in the last few years. However, it was a clever move by Neil, as Norwich defended extremely well and then hit Swansea on the counter and looked dangerous whenever they had the ball.
Norwich managed to restrict Swansea to no efforts on target throughout the match, keeping their first clean sheet of the season, but they had to get the goal for the win. They did just that, Neil brought Mbokani off the bench and the move paid dividend as he headed across a Robbie Brady corner for Jonny Howson to head home the winning goal.
Alex Neil said this about his change of tactics for the match:
We opted for a different approach today and it worked for us.
We weren’t keeping clean sheets despite playing well so we used a different tactic.
It worked for us – we had the best opportunities in the game and we achieved what we set out to achieve before the game.
At this point of the season it is all about points rather than performances and I think we deserved the points.
The whole thing we tried to do today was keep a clean sheet and then hopefully have enough quality to get a goal at the other end.
It’s hard to get that balance right without going ultra-defensive but when we got the goal we stayed relativity solid and carried a threat so we struck that balance well in the second half.
It’s pleasing because we’ve put a bit of a gap between ourselves and the teams at the bottom and this isn’t one of our best performances but it’s a win so we take it and move on.
Comments.
Loading comments…