NEW Norwich City boss Dean Smith insisted he knew all about the threat posed by Saints, having managed Aston Villa against them earlier this month. Smith made a swift return to management just over a week after he was sacked by Villa, following five straight Premier League defeats. Saints were Smith’s last opponents while he was in charge of Villa, with a 1-0 loss followed by his exit two days later. Having now signed a two-and-a-half-year deal at Carrow Road, the manager’s first challenge will be to try to thwart Ralph Hasenhuttl’s men at Carrow Road on Saturday.
Dean Smith said: “I think certainly coming into the training ground here at Colney and meeting up with the staff, I already have an idea of how Southampton play because we came up against them so recently in the last game I managed for Villa. So it should help me in terms of not having to catch up so much compared to if it was a club that I’ve not played against, but they beat Aston Villa 1-0 so we have to turn the result around with the performance.”
Norwich are currently bottom of the pile on goal difference, having won just one of their first 11 contests.
Dean Smith said: “The top of the in-tray is not to concede goals, we’ve conceded too many already and defensively we want to make our structure and organisation a lot stronger and we’ve got talented players and we need to go and score more goals obviously. We haven’t scored as many as we would have liked to, but there’s definitely players there who can do both sides of the job. When I spoke to Stuart (Webber, Norwich’s sporting director), he believes in the squad of players, I’ve looked at the squad of players with Craig (Shakespeare, assistant head coach) and we both believe that it’s a squad that probably aren’t producing the results they need and our job is to improve their performance levels. If we do that then we’ll get the results.”
