Under 21 coach Dmitri Halajko has spoken about how professional and fired up his players were for their game against the Manchester United U21s.
Norwich U21’s defeated the young Red Devils 2-0, with goals from Jamar Loza and Kyle Lafferty, who is again trying to prove a point to manager Alex Neil.
Neil this week rebuffed a loan bid from Leeds United for the Northern Ireland international, saying that no players will be leaving the club on any loan deals before January, halting any move to Elland Road.
Lafferty has spoken constantly about needing first team football, especially after his Northern Ireland side qualified for their first major tournament in over 30 years, with Lafferty’s goals being a contributing factor.
After scoring the goal, Halajko praised Lafferty and the other senior squad members professionalism, as well as praising their passion.
He’ll be very happy with that, I thought he, and all the first-team players were very professional in their approach and showed the quality that they’ve got.
I think all the players were (fired up). When you play at the level that Kyle’s played at, he can fire himself up for every game, and we saw that.
Halajko also had praise for trialist Arinse Uade, formally of Arsenal, who replaced Lafferty as a substitute.
Arinse used to be at Arsenal, he’s a Nigerian under-17 international, He’d only been with us for three training sessions and this was his first game.
We’re reviewing it after the game, the first part was three training sessions and a game and now the coaching staff will got their heads together and decide where to go from there.
Halajko also praised the first team players drafted into his side, with special mention going to Scottish international Graham Dorrans.
I thought he was excellent all night as well and I really hope that our younger ones can learn from them, That’s what they’ve got to do, after seeing them on the pitch and playing alongside them, it’s invaluable experience.
It should be someone that Conor (McGrandles) can learn off just by the stuff that Graham was saying to him during the game. He was talking to him quite a lot, learning from his use of the ball.
When we went 2-0 up I thought Graham did really well, to dictate the tempo and calm everyone down and kept the ball for us – which is something we haven’t done particularly well this season, at key points of games just to slow it down and keep control of it.
The win saw the under 21’s move off the bottom of the u21 Premier League table, and ended a 6 match winless run.
