City boss Glenn Roeder insisted his side's five-goal blitz of morning leaders Wolves was no shock to him. It was the second time in his managerial reign that the Canaries had scored five at Carrow Road, but the previous victims were bottom club Colchester last March, not the team at the top of the Championship table.

City boss Glenn Roeder insisted his side's five-goal blitz of morning leaders Wolves was no shock to him.

It was the second time in his managerial reign that the Canaries had scored five at Carrow Road, but the previous victims were bottom club Colchester last March, not the team at the top of the Championship table.

He said: “I am not surprised about the result at all. Our best two performances this season have been against teams that have been at the top of the table - Birmingham City and tonight.

“The acid test for me now is Saturday, playing a team that is below us in the table, Doncaster. We can't have an 'after the Lord Mayor's show' performance. We need the same sort of performance and we need to stick away our chances when we create them.

“We have had games this year when, had we taken our chances, this would not have been the first time we scored five goals.

“You can go through all the games one by one. We took a lucky point at Barnsley. But we can go through the other games, like Southampton, where we were missing open goals, where we shouldn't have lost the game because of the quality of the chances we had, but we missed them.”

Roeder enthused about on-loan striker Leroy Lita's hat-trick, saying: “That is the Leroy Lita that I have seen at Bristol City and I have certainly seen many times for Reading and England Under-21s. You have got to remember he came here not match fit.

“He came to us against Derby still a little bit rusty. The chance he had in the last minute to equalise against Derby, tonight he would have taken, because he is back to the real Leroy Lita. There was an improvement in his game on Saturday at Bristol City. He had two great chances - unfortunately he didn't take one of them, and tonight he's punished Wolves. He has taken it out on Wolves.”

Roeder said his players were overdue a change of fortune.

He said: “I am very happy for the players. For once they got what they deserved. Too often this year we haven't got what we've deserved. But a run of misfortune, bad luck, call it what you want, doesn't last forever, as I told the players at the team meeting today.

“We had to force ourselves into a run of good fortune and there wouldn't be a better opportunity than this, playing a team at the top of the table. If you are not going to be inspired tonight you will never be inspired.

“The last thing I said to them was 'Talk is cheap. What we need is action'. And they certainly came out and provided a lot of action.

“The players deserve this performance, they deserve this result and let's be fair, we haven't scored from just the five chances that we had. We have had four or five other brilliant chances and let's hope that we have saved them for another day, in other words, Saturday.”