The grey pall that hung over Carrow Road at kick-off last Saturday was ominous enough, but when Anis Mehmeti was afforded the freedom of Norwich to pick his spot after 16 minutes, things got even gloomier.

City had started brightly, but visibly wilted after the goal and any energy in the crowd quickly evaporated as the home side found themselves unable to raise their game.

Even without the loss of so many starters it would have been a challenging game against a very good Bristol City side, but with a patched-up side it was always going to be an uphill struggle. Had the early header from Emiliano Marcondes found the net instead of the post perhaps things might have been different, but I suspect not.

As at Hillsborough, City looked what they currently are, a patched-up amalgam of square pegs in round holes and players playing at considerably less than 100pc fitness.

Even the return of Anis Ben Slimane failed to spark the Canaries, with the Tunisian looking tentative and ineffective, but at least he didn’t appear to suffer any recurrence of his hamstring injury and now has two weeks of recovery time.

In fact, City’s midfield as a whole failed to generate much in the way of momentum, with Jacob Sorensen, another well short of full match fitness, and Oscar Schwartau preferring the safer backward pass to anything that was likely to open the opposition up.

Consequently, City’s domination of possession flattered to deceive as they failed to force a single significant save from Max O’Leary in the Bristol goal.

I did feel for Marcondes, who did his best to make his false nine role work, but he was never going to win many headers against two big centre backs and got precious little service on the floor, despite making a number of good runs. As ever, he, Kellen Fisher and Borja Sainz did all they could to lift their team-mates, but it was a thankless task.

It's hard to believe that a season that held so much promise a month ago has turned so sour so quickly, but the spate of injuries in such a short period of time has been beyond belief, and the extra game suspension for Kenny McLean has only added to the feeling that everything is against City at the moment.

That said, unlike the injuries, this is very much a self-inflicted wound, and while the red card may have looked harsh, McLean is a highly experienced professional who should know better than to exacerbate a situation.

His absence, along with that of Marcelino Nunez, has completely altered City’s ability to generate attacks from deep positions. Whereas both of them are happy to drop into the back four to pick up the  ball and look to progress it, Sorensen is a more conventional holding midfielder and is a more conservative passer.

As a result, opponents can now press high with much less risk of being played through and that has been made even easier in the last few games by some very sloppy play from City’s back four, culminating in Bristol’s second which came directly from a dreadful pass by Shane Duffy.

This is a completely new experience for Johannes Hoff Thorup, who had apparently never previously suffered three consecutive losses in his managerial career, but it is also part of a learning process from which I’m sure that he will emerge stronger.

No one will be too critical of a failure to produce results with almost the entire spine of the team missing and several of the replacements not fit enough to play a full 90 minutes, but when he gets players back there will be pressures that are very different to those at the start of the season when expectations were very low.

That will be  a new type of challenge for him but one that I suspect that he’ll relish.