Norwich City beat Burnley 4-1 at Carrow Road in the third round of the Championship. Mohamed Touré opened the scoring in the second minute, and Andre Brooks added his own in the fifth. By then the visitors had already begun to look uneasy, and the pattern of the afternoon was set before anyone could settle into their boots.
Touré made it two in the twenty-first minute, and Brooks extended his personal tally in the sixty-seventh. Burnley had pulled one back through Josh Laurent in the twenty-seventh, but the momentum had already shifted. Laurent was sent off in the seventy-seventh after picking up a second booking, and Norwich saw it out with the extra man.
There were plenty of changes in the final quarter. Schwartau and Musaba came on together for Norwich in the sixty-second, while Jacob Bruun Larsen replaced someone for Burnley in the sixty-third. Touré and Brooks were withdrawn in the seventy-first, and Kenny McLean and Hannibal Mejbri completed the evening's reshuffles.
And here's the thing about the numbers: Norwich had 37 per cent possession but created four big chances to Burnley's one. They took twelve shots, six on target, and their expected goals came to 1.92. Burnley controlled 63 per cent of the ball, registered eleven shots with four on target, and produced 0.95 expected goals. Many shots with one goal means chances went begging, and that was exactly what happened.
Norwich turned it around after the break, but they had been ahead all along. What changed was the complexion of the game once Laurent was dismissed. The hosts stayed compact, won their aerial duels evenly, and didn't need to chase anything. They gave nothing away in the final third and let the visitors run themselves into the ground.
The result lifts Norwich to sixteenth place on three points from three games. Burnley remain twenty-second with a single point, having won nothing in the opening three rounds. To be fair, not much more was expected from either side at this stage, but the gap between them has now widened to two points.
