Chris Hughton is under no illusions Norwich City have to get back to basics to arrest their Premier League decline.

The Canaries' 7-0 defeat at Manchester City capped a miserable recent run that has seen the club ship 14 goals in the last four top flight games and Hughton knows that trend must end with the his club languishing in the bottom three.

'We are so much better than what we have shown and defensively we have certainly been better than what we have shown. We need to address it,' he said. 'I feel there has been some development in our general play if you look at the Chelsea and Arsenal games in particular but still we have conceded too many goals. In terms of the progress we felt we had made on the ball in recent weeks, perhaps not at Manchester City, we have gone backwards in respect of our work without the ball. We are gifting soft goals. It is something we have to rectify very quickly. I am conscious of that and it is something we very much want to sort out.'

Norwich's mounting injury problems forced Hughton to abandon his central midfield experiment at the Etihad that had seen Alex Tettey deployed behind Jonny Howson and Leroy Fer. Bradley Johnson replaced Tettey alongside Fer in a holding pair that was unable to stem the onslaught in the north-west.

'If I looked at our last home game, we played 4-3-3 and that had been the case really since Stoke,' said Hughton. 'I'm conscious of the formation and what we need for each game but that system had given us good control at times, certainly against Cardiff, when we were able to get into goalscoring games. I think you have to look at the games individually because each match has been different. If I looked at Arsenal at 2-1 I made a tactical change which although we knew it would be tough would give us an opportunity to level and sometimes when you do that you open yourself up on the counter. It can happen when you push for a result. As for the Chelsea one, when it went 1-1 we looked the more likely to score but we got caught on our corner and there isn't anything you can look at and pinpoint as a tactical error or a problem with the system.'