Carlos Corberan thrilled with West Brom’s win at Coventry

Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2023 by PA

Carlos Corberan was delighted after his West Brom side secured a 2-0 win against Coventry at the CBS Arena.

Grady Diangana pounced on a Ben Wilson error to slot home in the first half before Brandon Thomas-Asante fired in a second amid calls for offside from the Sky Blues’ back-line.

“The result of course was excellent,” said Corberan. “We know that Coventry is one team that didn’t lose at home so far, during the game we realised how difficult it was to win here tonight.

“The first goal was a collective action, Grady was showing how connected he is with the game because normally not every player will go for the second ball.

“The second was a very good action, very good pass of (Matt) Phillips, good running of Asante and the level of finish was excellent.

“I am very pleased to have the three points for the level of effort the players have put into the game tonight. In defence in the first half we need to defend much better. In attack we need to attack more, in the second half we improved in the counter attack but there are still things we need to do better to improve as a team.

“I didn’t watch the action (possible offside) so it’s impossible for me to make any decisions. You need to pause, to see with VAR to make the decision but on live, some actions are impossible.

“I think in one action if there is a clear offside it’s easy to see, if there is no clear offside it’s very difficult, and if there is no clear offside there is no advantage. I think VAR shows us sometimes that they disallow the goals in the action that you don’t see an advantage of the striker with the position of the defender.

“If there was an advantage I think the referee would have been watching. I hope it wasn’t offside because I always like to win with the results being fair.”

Coventry boss Mark Robins bemoaned a lack of belief within his side, who were handed their first home defeat since April and sit 20th in the Championship after three consecutive defeats.

Robins said: “The negative is obviously the result. We’ve got to a situation where we’ve lost the last three and we’ve conceded really poor goals and made some poor decisions.

“We’ve had plenty of the ball and got into good positions, but what I would say is we need to be more positive when we’ve got positions to shoot.

“We moved the ball well, we played through the midfield area pretty well and there are areas that we clearly need to be better in.

“There were some good things we did in the game but we can’t concede goals that give us a mountain to climb.

“Belief is a bit lacking in certain individuals but we made a lot of bad decisions as well.

“Ultimately they’ve got the win off the back of a goal we’ve given to them and an offside goal that wasn’t seen by the officials.

“I saw it live and it looked offside and then I went to have a look at the monitor and he was offside. But the action that led to it wasn’t right either. We tried to play offside, that was a major decision because we were still in the game, we had chances to equalise having gone a goal down.

“It’s poor by Ben Wilson. We can’t give people chances like that and expect people to keep the ball out of the net. It’s poor. We all make mistakes and it’s just how you deal with them and how you put those forward.”