Carlos Corberan focused on West Brom consistency as Baggies climb to fifth

Posted Saturday, February 04, 2023 by PA

West Brom head coach Carlos Corberan urged his side to continue to strive for consistency to fuel their promotion bid after a historic 1-0 win against Coventry.

Grady Diangana’s 15th-minute tap-in clinched a sixth straight home league win for the Baggies without conceding and lifted them to fifth in the Sky Bet Championship.

It was the first time they have kept six successive league clean sheets at The Hawthorns since December 1977, while they now have not conceded in 697 minutes in front of their own fans including the FA Cup.

“If you lose a game, you’re talking about a crisis. If you win a game, you’re talking about this (top two),” said Corberan when asked if they can target an automatic promotion spot.

“My mentality is to keep performing well because I know if my team performs better, we have more chances to win the game.

“And the more games we win, the better position we will be in the table.

“To do this, we need positive results and the main way to get positive results is to have positive performances. So this is our focus.”

Albion missed numerous chances through Jed Wallace, who also hit the post, and Daryl Dike (two) but Corberan was satisfied with the heights his team reached.

“Every time we’re here in front of our fans, we’re pleased to make them proud,” added the Spaniard.

“The idea was to look for the result from the first moment to the last one.

“We try to be aggressive in defence and try to play with a lot of personality in attack and be dominant.

“The level of commitment, personality and concentration was very high.

“That level enabled us to win the game and deserve the result we achieved.

“It was the right reaction we needed and the right mentality to finish the game.

“The second half was different and we couldn’t control it at the same level but for me with the changes, the team was balanced more.”

Coventry manager Mark Robins was far from impressed with the way his side started the game.

“The first half wasn’t great so whoever you’re playing, you can’t start like that so that was disappointing,” he said.

“In this league, if you start on the front foot, you can push them back but we didn’t do it.

“They came onto us and we didn’t deal with it – we were sloppy, and there was a ball out from Ben Wilson where we slashed at it and that started to play with our minds.

“It was disappointing and the goal compounded that. We had one opportunity that was fashioned pretty well when we got down their right-hand side and put a ball in the box and Viktor Gyokeres was just inches away from tapping it into an empty net.

“But it wasn’t enough and we spoke about it at half-time and we started a bit better.”