Ante Crnac scored on his return from a lengthy injury as Norwich City earned their spot in the Carabao Cup third round at the expense of hosts Cardiff City.<\/p>\n
Crnac, making his first appearance in 10 months after being out with a cruciate ligament injury, doubled the Canaries’ advantage after Mathias Kvistgaarden had given them a first-half lead.<\/p>\n
Norwich will take encouragement from a victory over their divisional rivals, having failed to record a win in their opening Championship fixtures.<\/p>\n
For Cardiff, the game will be remembered for Noah Anyadike’s debut aged 15 years and 98 days, the youngest in club and competition history.<\/p>\n
The Wales youth international was thrust into the starting line-up by Brian Barry-Murphy amid a defensive injury crisis, and hobbled off with his own knock after 53 minutes.<\/p>\n
Except for a few long-range efforts, neither side looked likely to open the scoring until Kvistgaarden gave Norwich the lead midway through the first half.<\/p>\n
Unmarked from a corner, the Dane powered in a header, and Liam Gibbs would have doubled the Canaries’ lead five minutes later had it not been for Nathan Trott.<\/p>\n
Norwich came even closer to increasing their advantage five minutes after the restart when Anis Ben Slimane headed on to the crossbar.<\/p>\n
Crnac made the most of his comeback as he let rip from range, but could only sting the palms of Bluebirds keeper Trott.<\/p>\n
But the 22-year-old did not have to wait much longer for the moment he would have been dreaming about as he slotted home on 78 minutes to ensure Norwich’s progress. <\/p>\n
An injury-time goal from Yousef Salech, his fourth of the season, was too little too late for Cardiff, despite a late frenzy.<\/p>\n
The draw for the third round of the EFL Cup takes place on Wednesday, 26 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ante Crnac scored on his return from a lengthy injury as Norwich City earned their spot in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-749654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}