Birmingham City: Alex McLeish confident away win is on the cards

Mar 9 2009 By Andy Walker

“They never say die the players. It was a tough game coming off the back of Wednesday (v Bristol City), not a lot of time to recover and we know that there’s more pressure on us to win these games. Southampton themselves were under a wee bit of pressure so it was always going to be a tough fixture.

“We’ve dealt with two very tough fixtures, OK at St Andrew’s we fancy ourselves against anyone here but know we’ve got a difficult away one and we’ll go to it with confidence.”

Much of the pre-match talk had been about Karren Brady’s comments in her weekly column for a national newspaper, words that hardly painted the managing director and manager’s relationship in a good light. However, McLeish refused to be goaded into a public war of words with his MD following the win over the Saints.

“I’m only going to talk about the football, that is my side of it,” he said.

“I’ve got a team full of spirit, full of confidence, they are all pulling for each other, the coaches are all pulling for each other out on the training ground.

“I’ve got to say that we will keep working on the player’s morale. Morale is fantastic, my job is to give them morale, give them confidence and I’m not going to talk about anything external, other than the lads that are doing so well for us.”

Another injury, this time to striker Marcus Bent who hobbled off in the first-half with a hamstring problem, dampened McLeish’s mood slightly.

“I don’t think anybody should forget that we’ve lost key players for long parts of this season. I know other teams have had injuries as well but we’ve been particularly hard done by in terms of the injury toll,” he added.