Nigel Pearson admits Bristol City ‘need to win more games’ after Coventry draw

Posted Monday, January 02, 2023 by PA

Nigel Pearson admitted Bristol City need to win more games after making it one win in nine league matches following a 1-1 draw with Coventry.

Antoine Semenyo’s first City goal since mid-September cancelled out Jake Bidwell’s first Sky Blues strike to give the Robins a second consecutive away point after a 0-0 draw with Millwall on Thursday.

“We need to win more games,” said the former Leicester manager. “That doesn’t change, we’ve had two very tough away games and we’ve shown a level of commitment, desire and ability in both games to look capable of winning.

“It’s a game both sides were capable of winning and threatened to win, but there was some really good defending from both teams.

“In our position at the minute, we’re short of wins but the last two performances have been really solid away performances with some really good attacking play too. I’d rather have a point than nothing.

“There were some great performances today, I don’t think anybody was a weak link, there was a lot of really good play offensively and defensively.”

Ghanaian Semenyo’s last Robins goal came in a 3-2 loss to Norwich in September, but the forward was in the right spot to place his left-footed effort into the bottom corner following Nahki Wells’ blocked shot.

Pearson explained: “He’s been frustrated but you know what strikers are like, once they get one they think the next one will be here in two minutes’ time.

“But, from my own perspective, as long as strikers do what they’re there to do in terms of work rate then whether they score or not is how they judge themselves, I don’t judge them like that.

“As long as they bring the qualities that we need for the team to function in the way that we like to play, I’m relatively happy because I know they’ll score at some point.”

Coventry manager Mark Robins bemoaned his lack of squad depth that prevented him from making game-changing substitutions for his side to grab a winner.

The Sky Blues are without Kyle McFadzean, Josh Eccles and Matt Godden to long-term injuries, whilst Callum O’Hare will be out for a minimum of nine months with a ruptured ACL.

“We haven’t got enough in terms of a significant pool of players to be able to change things enough to go and win a game when it’s needed,” explained Robins. “When you’ve got people that are leggy and sometimes when you’re putting a team out on the field you just don’t know how long they’re going to last for.

“I thought we started off brightly, I thought we looked like we were the team that was going to get the second goal as well which would have killed it.

“You could see that we were lacking in energy, I thought you could tell we played two games in four days and the third game is always a stretch.

“You can see some strange decisions made by players that are usually really solid in their decision making but also in their quality. You see Premier League games yesterday where there’s a lack of quality, you never thought you’d say that but they’re making different decisions than they’d usually make.

“We have a load of players injured so we’ve not been able to train and it looked like we needed to train, to try and get some things ironed out because we start to drag them onto us and make ourselves feel like we’re under pressure.”