Johannes Hoff Thorup admits Norwich City’s pre-season has not been perfect but insists the Canaries will be ready for a Championship kick-off at Oxford.

Patchy performances, fitness concerns and unwanted transfer distractions, culminating in Gabby Sara’s departure, have proved a challenge for the Dane in his first weeks in the job.

City’s 3-1 defeat to St Pauli in their pre-season finale last weekend also exposed defensive frailties Thorup knows he must eradicate.

“We can definitely see where we have to improve and nothing will be perfect to the first game, nothing will be perfect the second or third or the fourth game,” he said. “But we have to make sure that we create a team and a creative way of playing that can give us the results while we are building.

"And that's what we have to look at this week, so we can be as sharp as possible for Oxford on Saturday.

“The good thing about pre-season is you get some answers, but we definitely have to look at our structure again (on set pieces) because we should not concede a goal like we did from a corner and be behind after 20 minutes. In those moments in the game we need to be better to solve and to avoid those issues.

“I would have preferred a better result, to be fair, to build on the momentum from the good performance in Austria.

"What is important for the players and for the people in the club and for the fans to see is especially the first part of the (St Pauli) game if we can produce that again on Saturday in Oxford, we are in a good place.”

City’s two Carrow Road friendlies were notable for fast starts and an alarming decline in performance after conceding sloppy goals.

“Maybe we lost a little bit of confidence in the way that we wanted to play. I wasn’t satisfied at all with the goals that we give away (against St Pauli) because that's simply too easy,” said Thorup. “The positive thing is we can avoid those type of goals and that's something we can hopefully quite easily get rid of. But I liked the response from the players.

“We started the game very, very well. I think the energy of the first 15, 20 minutes was maybe the best we've seen so far. We should have scored, we should have been in front. And then we could see after that first goal we were a little bit too shaky.

“The players are really, really trying everything they can. And when we succeed with the way that we want to play, we could see that we could compete against two German teams in a row from the top tier.

"But we also can see where we need to improve. We are building this squad to be able to compete on the highest level.

"We need to be better than for only 20 or 25 minutes, but that's something that hopefully will happen. And when I look at these guys, I'm quite comfortable with this process.”