Let’s start with a bit of injury news, anymore on what’s going on with Kal and how serious that is?
He’ll be maybe 10 days, something like that. It’s not as serious as we initially thought so that’s good news for us.
It does leave you short…
It does but Timm (Klose) has trained and he’ll probably be in the squad for the weekend, which is good news for us.
With centre-backs there’s obviously less running, would that be a concern if you wanted to throw him in at the deep end?
Depends who you’re playing against! We threw him in the deep end when he signed for us, at Preston. Timm’s experienced so hopefully he’ll play some part but I thought Andy King did very well. We’ll find a way of making sure that we’re solid at the back, let’s put it like that.
I thought Andy King showed the value of that experience because he hasn’t had a lot of game time but he stepped into two positions…
He’s at the stage of his career where he understands exactly where his strengths are and he’s on the coaching staff so it’s good to get a member of the coaching staff on the pitch as well.
Players bring different things to the team. I think for Andy King, in particular, playing in a role there, especially in a three, is something which he’s very capable of dealing with, so that’s a real benefit for us.
You lose one to suspension, get another one back; that sort of disruption isn’t ideal for a coach, is it?
It doesn’t bother me. They’re both good players. It would have been nice to have everyone available so decisions need to be made. But Alex Scott coming back in is a real positive for the squad. It’s nice to have players with those types of qualities available. Joe misses out now, for one game, so we’ll see how that develops.
With the amount of games that we’ve got as well, there will be a need at times to freshen things up. But for the most part this season so far we’ve had a relatively settled side, which has been beneficial too. We’ll just deal with it.
Tomas Kalas, I did promise that I’d keep you updated so I may as well pre-empt your question and say he should be training within 10 days, which is really good news for us and for him too.
His levels of general fitness are very very good too. He’s even smiling these days, which is quite disconcerting.
You miss out on certain players. It’s inevitable you’ll get some injuries, we work very hard to avoid unnecessary ones, certainly in training, but in games, you’re not in control of that.
We’ll pick injuries up from time to time, it’s just important that we try and minimalise that and get as many players available as possible.
It’s always going to be frustrating with injuries, but given the situation you inherited and the situation where there were perhaps more people in the trainer’s room than the dressing room - that dynamic has definitely changed. It’s better than it has been…
Yes, but that takes a lot of hard work. From not just medical staff, sports science, the coaches need to be onside. Coaches, generally, create more mess in terms of creating injuries than anybody else. It’s important coaches accept their responsibility in keeping players fit. So it’s not just about the medical team.
On top of that, it’s also education for the players and then, the most important thing is recruiting players who have a history of playing rather than signing players who have a medical risk. And that’s what we have to get right over a sustained period.
It’s nice you notice it, but it’s something that doesn’t happen overnight. During, especially a Championship season, the chances to get physical adaptations for players who are playing every game, you can’t. International breaks and players who have maybe been out for a while, the World Cup break will be important to fine-tune a bit more.
Kane Wilson wasn’t involved in the squad on Tuesday night, was that an injury issue or a selection one?
He’s got a knee injury that he’ll have scanned and then we’ll assess how that is but hopefully it won’t be too long. It’s probably a grumble that’s been there for a while and I suppose it’s a bit like Timm’s, so we’ll see how that one is.
I thought Tuesday, it wasn’t the free-flowing football you’ve been playing for much this season but it showed the improvement you’ve made where it wasn’t quite clicking but you still looked relatively solid, certainly more so than you would have done last year…
Maybe, but I think we played some really good stuff and we created some promising attacking moments that didn’t really bear fruit. But you’ve got to give them some credit, they defended their box very, very well. I keep saying it, but the Championship is full of teams that are very hard to beat.
And you face another one on the weekend who haven’t had the greatest of starts but you look through the team and there’s a lot of quality there…
Yeah, they’ve got some good players. A manager who I’ve come across a few times. He’s going to be a very successful coach/manager. He’s very inventive, he’s got Keith (Downing) working with him so it’ll be nice to see him and Keith is a really good coach too.
They’ll be working hard to get the best out of the players that they have and it’s a game where we go there trying to win it.
Given the last two games, where teams have sat in against you and made it difficult to break down. Is it a different puzzle where you go somewhere and the onus is on the other team?
It depends. I would imagine they’ll play off Troy quite a bit, he’s a very experienced player, a good targetman. I worked with him at Watford, he’s a big personality too.
I think when we played them last year, they bullied us a bit there and we didn’t really deal with it in an effective way. So it’s a challenge for us to see whether we can deal with that sort of a threat this time around.
But I think we are playing better as well. They’ll be aware we have players that can hurt them.
What we have to do in these tight games - your conversion rate has to be good And it has been generally speaking this season, when we’ve created chances we’ve made the goalkeeper work or we’ve taken advantage.
You can’t expect your strikers to go through a whole season converting every chance that they get, or near enough. That’s why it’s important that we get goals from throughout the side and we still don’t score enough goals from midfield, we don’t score enough goals from set plays.
We had nine corners (against Coventry) and I think we only got the first contact three times. So with some of the players that we’ve got I would expect that to be better.
Last season was quite a difficult evening…
Yeah, it was rotten.
What difference do you see in the team now, not necessarily in how you’re playing but in the mentality, from 12 months ago?
We’ve just been in a difficult run of losing three games which, whether we deserved it or not, it doesn’t matter, we lost three games on a trot. And dealt with a tight game, I think, pretty well the other night.
We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? I just think there is a stronger collective mentality. There are going to be players playing on Saturday who played in the game last year who have made improvements themselves. And I don’t mean technically, I mean being able to deal with pressure or deal with whatever the game throws at them.
Most of the time when we talk internally about performances and players, it’s very rare we talk about technical issues, it’s whether the players were able to deal with the psychological pressure, their own demons, if you like. But I think at least there is, the group have been together for a bit longer, we’ve added players who have strengthened the squad but also they fit in as personalities. And I think that’s very important.
Recruitment is the most important aspect of football. You might have good coaches but it’s about the players that you’ve got. Certainly when you are shopping in a limited market, that everyone else is shopping in, because of the circumstances football finds itself in these days, we’ve got to make sure we get that right.
Fortunately, for us, the players we’ve added to the squad have been really good. The challenge is to get it right. We can ill afford to sign a duff player.
How do you get a process to limit the chance of that happening?
It’s like anything, it’s doing your homework on the people you sign. You’ve got to have an idea of the type of player that you want.
We’ve got to be proactive. There’s a lot of pressure on the recruitment department to get it right.
It’s going to be the case here on in for the football club. After I’m long gone, the club needs to continue to have policies in place to protect the football club rather than some of the policies that have gone before, but we’re not talking about that now.
It’s just about how we move forward, and we move forward by trying to recruit the right players for this club and ones that when they do come in improve the team.
How deep does the homework go? I know with all the statistics and analytics but is there a personal approach as well?
Absolutely, that’s massive.
Do some clubs overlook that?
I don’t know. I can’t talk about what happens elsewhere, all I know is that to minimalise the risk that a player’s not either good enough or good value, the givens are you know the player is good enough technically or physically - you should know that, all you have to do is look at players’ playing records to know whether they’re going to play games or not, that’s basic.
In terms of character, all the players we signed in the summer, the only time i get involved is when I meet them and, for me, that’s very very important to get an idea of whether they are having themselves or whether they’re the right sorts.
Have you turned down players having met them?
Everywhere, absolutely.
One of your predecessors, Gary Johnson, would say he’d like have an hour-long cup of tea with a player…
I don’t want to spend that long with them!
People I’ve worked with in the past, you gain experiences as you go through your career and remember one of my old coaches, who sadly died last year, Richie Barker, he said to me, if they play golf, I like to take them for a game of golf. I wouldn’t do that, I’m not spending four hours with somebody.
Just on Kal, he’s brought a lot to the team especially on the ball, in terms of bringing it out of defence. I know there’s a debate around that, but now he’s not in the team on Saturday, does that role fall on somebody else or do you have to adapt accordingly? Rob would be the obvious one to sort of fill that role…
Rob Atkinson wouldn’t be the person to fill that role, Rob’s an introvert; Rob’s a quiet person.
I mean the ability to bring it through, to break lines with the ball at their feet…
Rob’s more of a dribbler, isn’t he, let’s be honest, and he does that anyway. Which is really good. It’s an ability which is really good to have within our central defensive unit. But I look at it more from an organisational side of it, and more a leadership role and that would fall on Andy King, he assumed that role the other night. In terms of breaking lines, yeah, Kal is pretty exceptional at that.
I know we’ve conceded goals sometimes from doing that but the benefits far outweigh the risks that we take. I want the players to play with a positive mentality and they want to play like that too.
I can’t give you the answer to that, we’ve just got to collectively make sure that, first and foremost, we have an effective defensive unit, and that includes the wing-backs, even though we do like to be attacking as much as possible.
It depends on the challenges your opponents give you to a large extent. We try and play our own way but sometimes opponents will dominate in games and you’ve got to be able to deal with it.
We certainly need to keep more clean sheets, there’s no doubt about that, but whoever plays at the weekend will need to step up for the team.
You mentioned it briefly on Tuesday about back four being an option, is that still on the table?
No, not really. But I’ll say it again so that Birmingham think it might be. And so our players aren’t sure at the moment.
I don’t mean to second guess selection but in terms of Nahki (Wells) and Antoine (Semenyo) together up front, how do you build that chemistry? Are there things you can do on the training ground that help?
One of the things that we didn’t do well enough the other night was the front two didn’t really play close enough to each other. When people talk about it being a front three, with Andi deeper, Andi’s a part of the midfield unit sometimes, defensively when he has different roles and obligations to the team. But, really, I like the front two to play as a pair and Andi then makes his decision on what the others aren’t doing, that’s the basis.
I thought, at times the other night, it wasn’t an obvious two. What you see with Tommy (Conway) is he attacks the middle of the goal particularly well, which is why his first touch is a header on target.
But, hey, what a fantastic problem to have, if it’s a problem. It’s really good for us that we have players with that amount of ability and a diversity of what they bring to the team too, and it’s great.
And then add in Belly too, because he’s on fire at the minute. Which is great because he’s had a bit of a difficult few months or a season of… not misfiring, because he made his debut early days when I was here and he got injured after 10 minutes. He’s had one of those starts to the first-team experience that’s not as positive as some other players have but he’s in a really good place now, his game’s developed enormously.
And I think that comes through us, as a club, being on the same page, so that when our players turn out for the under-21s, it’s not seen as being a step down. Players use it for themselves to get themselves fit and we genuinely believe we have players coming through our system that will hopefully keep pushing the first team, so that’s good.
Do you see him as a central striker?
Not arf!
Because he’s tended to be a bit wider at times…
But we have played 4-3-3 quite a lot, and in that system he’s a good wide striker. But, in all honesty, his strength will be as one of the front two, because he can run for fun.
You mention about the players from last season, and also the importance of Troy Deeney; Zak has been very good of late, he had a difficult night last year… in terms of him playing against Deeney, what’s he going to have to do to stop him being so influential?
Not let him feel him.
What do you mean by that?
Troy likes to pin people. He wants to know where you are, and you have got to avoid that.
And how do you do that?
By bluffing him. If I was playing against him, I’d probably knee him up the arse! And he knows that as well!
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