Swansea City manager Graham Potter conceded that his side are not at Norwich City’s level after the Championship leaders continued their blistering form with a 4-1 thrashing at the Liberty Stadium.
The Swans might have made a bright and promising start but two gifted goals by the 25th minute gave Norwich the confidence and platform to go on and control proceedings. The Swans could never really recover despite a spirited fightback in the second half.
The third goal was all the visitor’s doing. The Swans were exposed again with Matt Grimes pushing forward down the left flank. Norwich broke forward through the middle and with the hosts backing off, they could pass the ball out wide and their player had plenty of time and space to pick out a team-mate at the far post who had the easiest of tap-ins to make it 3-0 on 37 minutes.
Four minutes later and four minutes before half-time, Dan James added what proved to be a consolation goal as the winger pounced on the loose ball after Naughton’s long-range strike was only parried by Krul.
That goal gave us small hope that the game was completely out of reach going into the second half but as we pushed for an early goal, Norwich grabbed a fourth on the hour-mark.
After the game, Potter admitted that we weren’t at their level:
“Norwich deserved to win over the course of the game. They attacked well and defended well.
“But we contributed more than we would have liked to their performance.
“Norwich are ahead of us in their development. Our challenge is to get to their level.”
“We can probably do better for the goals – we could understand the situation a bit better.
“But we are learning. We are trying to go forward as a team and there will be times when we make mistakes.
Potter now looks ahead to another tough home game on Wednesday night and he’ll need a big improvement from his side as West Brom are another side looking for promotion.
“I don’t think it was a lack of effort or application that cost us.
“But to improve you have to have a little bit of suffering along the way.
“It’s now a question of how we respond as a team and there’s no time to feel sorry for ourselves.
“We have another tough game (against West Brom) on Wednesday. We have to analyse what we could have done better in this game and then try to put that into practice on Wednesday.”
Potter claims that it wasn’t a lack of effort or application that cost them but some fans on social media were critical of some of the players’ lack of effort with some players “jogging about”.
Captain Leroy Fer was taken off at halftime along with Jay Fulton. It has to be said that you should never need or want to take off your captain but it had to be done. Grimes was moved into midfield with Olsson coming on at left back and Wilfried Bony added some more “fire-power” up top.
