Late heartbreak for City in Cardiff as that growing injury list starts to bite
Ouch! That stung. Some tired legs, befuddled minds, and wayward decision-making combined to throw away a game City should have won.
Fair play to Cardiff though. They hung in there when the Canaries had them on the ropes and, when the chance eventually came, threw a couple of punches that were enough to win it.
But from a yellow hue, it was one of those endings that take the wind out of your sails: from the precipice of victory to defeat in the space of four chaotic minutes. The type of chaos that Johannes Hoff Thorup tries to avoid, preferring instead for his team to have control of the ball and therefore control of the game.
But on this occasion, probably for the first time since the Dane’s arrival in Norfolk, he may have to take an introspective look at his role in City ceding territory and possession to the Bluebirds in those frantic closing moments.
He’s hardly put a foot wrong since he arrived – so has plenty of credits in the bank – but his understandable desire to keep bodies and minds fresh during a three-game week ended up having a negative rather than positive effect.
It wasn’t just the personnel who he added to the fray that became part of the problem – with a wafer-thin squad riddled with injury, substitutions invariably lead to a drop-off in quality – but so too his relatively early decision to go to a back five, which saw Cardiff wrestle back the initiative from City who, by then, should have been out of sight.
