West Brom 2 City 0.

Well, a disappointing setback after the plusses following the Charlton game. A game in which by concensus we were second best in all aspects, and we must be a team that West Brom certainly relish in playing given our record over the past two seasons since they returned to the Premiership.
It was a performance and result which seemed to be summed up succinctly by Stuart Pearce in his post game comments “last week’s a distant memory now to be quite honest. We weren’t good enough, too many players weren’t at the races today, both physically and wanting the ball.
“That’s what you get in the Premiership if you’re not. It’s disappointed me greatly and it’s disappointed the players greatly.”
Skipper Sylvain Distin was equally unimpressed, commenting “there are not a lot of good things to say, to be honest there are more bad things to say after that. I’m very disappointed, not too much by the result, but by how we lost the game.”
It is disappointing as this was one of the trio of games I identified that were 'winnable' leading upto the Christmas period which would give us a foothold into the European positions. Now, we are somewhat thankful for the start to the season which has allowed us to remain on the fringes of the top six.
Looking at the first eight games of the season, our record was W4 D2 L2 (DWWWDLLW), with the our last eight games record is W3 D1 L4 (WLWLDLWL). Whilst it is only four points difference over the split, the striking thing is that over the last eight games each time we have posted a win, the following game has seen a defeat and there has been no consistency in stringing any semblance of an unbeaten run together. We are now seeing very much an up and down period in not only our results, but performances on the whole.
This will be the key as to how far we will progress this season and we do need to rediscover the consistency seen at the start of the season, otherwise we will begin to fall away into the mid table pack, wheras if we can maintain a run of form over a five or six game period then this is what will mark us out against some of the sides we are challenging with.