Alex McLeish on Birmingham City's ploy against Chelsea

Nov 19 2010 by Colin Tattum, Birmingham Mail

ALEX McLeish has vowed that Birmingham City's approach against Chelsea at St Andrew’s tomorrow will be no different to their recent positive philosophy.

Sunderland stunned the Premier League leaders by going at them with two strikers and left Stamford Bridge 3-0 to the good.

And with Chelsea also without key quartet John Terry, Alex, Frank Lampard and Michael Essien, they suddenly seem fragile in the wake of that shock defeat, their second in three games.

To take advantage, Blues wouldn’t be copying Steve Bruce’s masterplan, they would try to do their own normal thing, said McLeish, which has included a strike pair in the line up.

“No, we won’t have a re-think about what we do after Sunderland because we approached the Man City game in the same way, although maybe we don’t have the potency Sunderland have,’’ said the manager.

“Steve was at our game last Saturday, maybe he saw it and thought ‘I’m going to go with two tomorrow’.

“I’m jesting because Steve had already commented they had worked on it the whole week about getting two up against them and getting in their faces. And they did that well.

“Chelsea have had a couple of defeats. The big teams don’t lose many in succession and I don’t know if Steve has done me any favours by winning that one.

“But we are in our own backyard and we have to believe that this is achievable, that we can win it.

‘‘We’ve got to ensure Chelsea are going back on their coach to London saying St Andrew’s is a tough place to go to.

“We did that with a lot of the big teams last season. We did that against Chelsea, we were unlucky last season as Chucho scored a perfectly legitimate goal which was ruled out.