Duffy won't panic as tiredness takes toll

Jim Duffy believes heavy legs cost City dearly in the early stage soft her opening summer friendly at Exeter on Saturday. The Canaries were given the run-around in the opening 15 minutes and conceded two quick goals against a side who were playing their fourth match in five days.

Jim Duffy believes heavy legs cost City dearly in the early stages of their opening summer friendly at Exeter on Saturday.

The Canaries were given the run-around in the opening 15 minutes and conceded two quick goals against a side who were playing their fourth match in five days.

“Certainly we were very lethargic in the first 10 minutes,” said the Canaries assistant manager. “I'm not quite sure what that was down to, we'll have a little think about that over the next couple of days.

“I think it's primarily down to the fact that we have worked the players extremely hard this week and it took them 10 or 15 minutes to get their legs going again and unfortunately by that time we had made the elementary errors and we found ourselves two goals down.

“We have trained for about eight or nine days and this is the first match and there were a lot of new players, a lot of young players and we changed the system as well and there are some key players still to come in. You get judged very, very quickly in football but as a coach you can't press the panic button because you had a bad 15 minutes.

“We got better as the game went on, particularly in the second half. We played quite good football and we were certainly stronger, but credit to Exeter, they were sharper - they have had a couple of games and you could see the benefit of that.

“We know there is a lot of work ahead of us, but there is a month to go before the start of the season and the key element is to get the blend right before kick-off.”

The work continues this week on the Colney training grounds as well as at Lowestoft tomorrow and King's Lynn on Wednesday, before City up the tempo with two games in Holland followed by home matches against Premiership side West Ham and then a final pre-season outing against Vitesse Arnhem.

“I think we will get to Holland and will assess the squad a little bit, then we have another two games so that will give us five matches,” Duffy said. “By that time you would be getting less changes you would have to say, so after the trip to Holland I think we will have a clearer indication of what the manager sees his strongest team.

“There is a lot of work ahead of us but we are not frightened of work and we know gradual improvement is required and hopefully that will be the case right through the pre-season.”