Sam McCallum views a season long loan stint at Coventry City as the best route to Norwich City’s first team.

The young left back may well have got a shot in the coming weeks at his parent club with Xavi Quintilla missing the midweek Championship draw at Brentford with a hip flexor issue.

But McCallum opted to return to his old club, a move which has seen him start the past three league games ahead of Friday’s tussle with early leaders Reading, after a heart-to-heart with Daniel Farke.

The 20-year-old made his Canaries’ competitive debut at Luton Town in the League Cup but felt opportunities might be limited at Carrow Road in the short term.

“The loans and the signings that were made at Norwich made it a bit harder for me to get myself into the side,” he said. “I had a meeting with the manager and he wanted me to get some game time in the Championship and I was grateful that the club wanted me on loan and coming here was a no-brainer.”

Mark Robins’ newly promoted squad have endured a tough week with a heavy 4-0 home defeat to Blackburn and a late 2-0 reverse at Middlesbrough, where they conceded twice in the final 10 minutes.

“It’s been a rocky start but obviously we’re still trying to find our feet, at this new level it’s a massive step up from League One,” said McCallum, speaking to Coventry’s official site. “The standard is unbelievable, and you’ve seen that in the results from Wycombe and Rotherham, once we find our feet, we’ll get going and start getting points on the board.

“We’re just trying to work the league out, in our upcoming fixtures I think we can start scoring goals and picking up points, we all contribute to goals and we’re all accountable for the goals we score and for the goals we concede as well.

“It’s still early days, we know from past seasons that the league can change by Christmas and after Christmas that’s when it starts getting serious and teams that are serious about fighting for promotion and the play-offs will start climbing the league.

“At the moment, it’s more of a case of working the league out and understanding what the different teams are like, we were in League One for a couple of seasons and we’d worked the league out by then and it allowed us to kick on and go for promotion.”

McCallum accepts few outside the Sky Blues camp expect them to inflict a first defeat of the league season on the Royals.

“This is the game to do it, if we’re going to do it, last season we played amazing against the good teams and this is our chance to put a mark on this league and show the other teams in the Championship what we can do,” he said.

“I think we’ll give them a good run about, they’re top of the league but we’re not too worried about that because it’s early days and we know that can change in such a short time period, teams go in and out of form and that applies to us as well, hopefully we can kick on and start climbing up the league.”