Norwich City: Club Brugge Belgian tour opener for Thorup

The Danish boss got his Carrow Road era off to a 3-0 winning start away to Northampton but knows Christos Tzolis’ new club present a much stiffer test at the Schiervelde Stadion (KO 5:30pm UK).

City’s travelling party left England on Tuesday with the likes of Adam Idah and Kenny McLean on the plane after missing out at Sixfields.

“We cannot waste any games, we have to use all the minutes that we can,” he said. “To build some relations between players, but also to see if we can find a base within the team so that from time to time there can be changes whenever we play, but instead of just mixing everything together we have that base.

“A step up in terms of intensity, but also a step up for us in terms of how we need to prepare and how we need to perform to get a good performance. It's always good to have that in pre-season, because then we get up to speed and that's exactly what we need here.

"We showed the basics are there (at Northampton) after two weeks of training, but now against even better opponents it is exciting to see, and that is what we need.”

Thorup took one big lesson away from his first game in charge.

“I think it was obvious the times where we played fast and we used fewer touches and we were combining with each other we could actually create chances,” he said. “And also obvious for everyone was whenever we slowed it down, were a little bit too comfortable and maybe on the ball taking too many touches, then we didn't really create anything.

“It was a good in terms of we got the reward when we did things at a top level with high intensity. And we also saw that we struggled a little bit to open them up when we were too slow.”

- The Pink Un will be providing full coverage of the Canaries' time in Belgium, including both friendly matches against Club Brugge and Standard Liege, in partnership with Chips Away Norwich