Norwich City head coach David Wagner has praised young winger Christos Tzolis after the Greek scored his first league goal for the club against Birmingham.

Tzolis clinched the game with a 94th-minute strike, making it 3-1 after some nervy late defending from the Canaries. The German praised that contribution, but underlined that there was still work to do for the 21-year-old who returned early from a loan at FC Twente in January.

"The finish was top class," he said. "Obviously with Christos we have a plan, an idea of where we’d like to get him to. He needs time for sure but this goal, this great goal which he’s shown today and, to be fair, in training shown quite often, this will give him a boost in terms of confidence."

Wagner is hoping the £8.8million man, who was signed from PAOK before struggling to make an impact in the Premier League, can help ease the burden on his strikers, with both Josh Sargent and Teemu Pukki out injured at present.

He continued: "We need goalscorers in our team. We have goalscorers in our team. It shows that it shouldn’t be the case that you are relying only on the top goalscorers.

"[Against Birmingham] we missed our top two (Sargent and Pukki). This can cause you problems. I think today we have shown, all the guys have shown, that it was not really obvious that we missed them, even if we’d love to have them back because we need competition all over the park. It’s important that the players who step in do their job and they’ve done it today. Fantastic."

The victory took Norwich to within a point of the Championship play-off places, but Wagner played down any talk of the second division table, saying: "One point, two points, if you’re not now in the top six it’s not really important.

"It’s nice to see, and maybe it’s important for your head, but what we are still focused on is our performance. Today it was a good performance, a deserved result. These performances we have to try to produce consistently.

"We’d like to have a third home win in a row on Saturday (against Cardiff)."