Dean Smith admitted Norwich City let Crystal Palace off the hook in Wednesday night's 1-1 Premier League stalemate.

Teemu Pukki scored the fastest goal in the league this season, after just 38 seconds, but Wilfried Zaha’s stunning strike levelled the contest.

Zaha then miscued from the penalty spot to let City off the hook in a tense second half at Carrow Road.

But the Canaries held on to stretch their unbeaten league run to three games, ahead of a daunting double header against Manchester City and then Liverpool.

“No one knows how big that point could be,” said Smith. “We are disappointed of course not to go on and win the game after scoring first. But I thought Palace were good, second half, and it was a deserved draw in the end for both.

“I can feel a growth in the squad at the moment. It is a bubbling place to be around. Results breed confidence and belief and we need to take that forward now.

"We know we have a couple of challenging games to come, but they are opportunities as well. Sometimes the so called lesser sides in this league can upset the big guns.”

Smith felt City should have pressed home their early advantage.

“You could say it was too early when we scored but we created two other big chances in that first half-an-hour, and Teemu is disappointed not to take them,” said the Canaries’ boss. “If we score there then I felt the game goes away from Palace.

“It was a tricky balancing act. We were weighing up how do we change it? Do we bring one of the centre forwards off, or a wide player? Unfortunately they score during that period when we needed to change it.

"We understood with the system we were playing we would give up a lot of the ball but I didn’t feel we worked hard enough to make the ball go where we wanted it.

"A lot of their attempts, apart from the penalty, were from areas it should be difficult to score. As we saw with the equaliser, which was a great finish, but for me, I thought we lost out in the second half because we were not good enough when we got the ball back.

“I look at it from our perspective. It was a superb strike, but we had spoken a lot about if it was Zaha or (Michael) Olise, we have to show them on the outside, because they want to come in on their favoured foot.

"We didn’t do that well enough. We had two out there but we couldn’t stop him.”