Dean: Blues squad is now getting closer

HARLEE Dean believes Birmingham City’s squad is growing closer as they begin to turn round their disappointing season.

The defender played a starring role in Saturday’s 1-0 victory over Nottingham Forest, a result that lifted Blues out of the Championship’s bottom three.

Che Adams’ strike brought them their first goal and win in five attempts as Blues bounced back from the demoralising defeat at Barnsley in their previous outing. After that match at Oakwell, Dean made an impassioned call for more togetherness – and he believes the way forward is becoming more clear.

“I don’t know whether it was misconstrued that there was a rift in the dressing room. It wasn’t a rift, it was just different directions that people were going in – different styles of football and a lot of people have been chucked in at once,” he said.

“The team’s fully together and in the past two weeks it’s got even closer. I think we can get closer still. We’re still going to have our rows on the pitch – that’s part and parcel of football and wanting to win the game.

“We know the direction we want to go in. We know where we’re going but we’re not there yet. We will definitely get there. I know no team is too big to go down, but our squad is too good not to be challenging. When we get it right, it will be good – I can feel it and I think other people can feel it too.”

Dean says that feeling comes from becoming better at implementing Steve Cotterill’s longerterm vision for the team.

“It was a pleasure to play and it felt more like a team performance – we were more together. It’s been like that around the place for the last two weeks really,” he said.

“After the Barnsley game it was disappointing but we knew there was an improvement on the pitch.

“It might not have seemed that way but we could tell and we built on it and got the right result and now we’ve got to back it up because it’s still only three points.”