Birmingham City manager Lee Bowyer has singled out Andi Weimann as the one dangerman who could be the difference between the two sides at the weekend.
Bristol City host the visitors on Saturday looking for a change in fortunes following the dismal 3-0 reverse defeat at St Andrews over four months ago. Nigel Pearson's side head into the contest on the back of two defeats but four victories in their last five matches on home soil have provided plenty of room for optimism.
Bowyer is fully aware of the strength of Pearson's sides possess and shared his thoughts on what he expects from the contest including the qualities of Weimann in particular.
He said in his pre-match press conference: "A tough physical game, with all Nigel's sides he demands that from them a bit like myself.
"It's going to be tough, they're a good side. They have people in the final third who can hurt you. Weimann is a very good player in and around the box, he's dangerous in the middle of the park, he can receive it he can play and he's got good energy.
"So it's going to be a tough game, but we've also got good players and hope we turn up and we're all at it."
Weimann, formerly of Blues' rivals Aston Villa, heads into the game in a rich vein of form with four goals and five assists in his last nine matches. His 16 goals scored this season is also a career-best having forged a prolific partnership with strike partner Antoine Semenyo in particular.
Pearson is eager to put last week's disappointing performance at Nottingham Forest behind them but also spoke positively of the progression his side have made since the reverse fixture in the Midlands back in November.
The City manager said: "That was a night in which, a bit like it’ll be this weekend, they can play with wing-backs and when they play with fullbacks they give them a lot of width and create crossing situations. We didn’t stop any crosses when we played them and consequently, we caused ourselves all sorts of problems.
"You’ve got to be able to deal with what the main threats of your opponents are and we were very poor at that on that evening.
"At the start of the season, we were a lot tighter and a lot safer, we had different players available and we were more solid in some respects but we were too one dimensional as an attacking threat because of that.
"I try to review performances as we go and we’ve made massive inroads into creativity. You wouldn’t have thought that if you’d seen us last week because we were poor but we were poor in that respect because we couldn’t get hold of the ball in midfield.
"All those things together would indicate that last week was a bit of a bad day but we know that we are a very capable side and what we have to do is combine our ability to cause teams problems but keep things tight and a lot of that is down to either concentration or sometimes ability."
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