Alex Neil insists he witnessed nothing in City's second-half stumble to alter his view the Canaries will take some stopping in the Championship promotion stakes.

Neil's first Carrow Road outing was going according to plan at the interval before two goals in three minutes around the hour mark made for a bumpy ride, but the Scot learned a few valuable lessons.

'That was a great experience for me in terms of knowing my team, knowing my players and how they react when they came up against a wee bit of adversity,' he said. 'We seemed to think we were cruising and that is perhaps the hardest time to change it, not in terms of personnel but in the flow of the game on the pitch.

'If you are winning 3-0 your mindset becomes trying to see it out. When it goes to 3-2, it's different. You need to change the team's mindset to say, 'We need to get out finger out here now and start going about our business in the right way'. I thought we did that to a certain extent, it can still improve, but I have hundreds of good things to work with.

'We are a real threat going forward and if we can just keep it tighter at the back and make better decisions, which is not something that is extremely difficult to fix, there is no reason we should not be a good force this season.'

Neil admitted the nature of his side's second-half showing left a sour taste.

'I think people will go away thinking maybe it was not as good a performance but if you had played in the second half as we did the first they would be going home buzzing,' he said. 'If we were 2-0 down at half-time and we'd scored three times then people go home really raving about the team. The perception of the game is totally different but it's three points and for 60 minutes we were the better side.

'I wouldn't even say Cardiff were better for the final half-an-hour. It was just a case of lumping it up the park and applying a bit of pressure.

'We broke away three or four times in that period and should have done better.'