It’s still possible for us to have a positive season - Pearson
ROVERS BOSS CONFIDENT STRIKER HAS THE POTENTIAL TO DEVELOP INTO A TOP PLAYER IN LEAGUE ONE
NIGEL Pearson is hopeful Bristol City can “still have a positive season” as they prpeare for a tough trip to a Swansea City side chasing one of the two automatic promotion places in the Championship.
Pearson will officially take charge of City for the first time at the Liberty Stadium, although he had some pre-match input in Tuesday’s morale-boosting 3-1 win at Middlesbrough, which ended a dreadful run of six successive defeats. That left City in 12th place, 13 points clear of the relegation zone and seven adrift of the final play-off place.
When asked about what the expectations may now be for City fans over the rest of the season, Pearson replied: “Expectationwise, I can’t tell people what they expect. What I can say is there are real possibilities for us to still have a positive season.
“To do that, though, we’re going to have to consistently perform at a high level, we’re going to have to have a sustained run of good results and time will tell whether we’re capable of doing that.
“The capabilities will depend on whether we can manage the games programme because as you’ll know yourself, there’s been a number of injuries but so what? We’ve got injuries, we get on with it. The games programme, everyone has to deal with it. We have to make sure that we do what we can and I’m not bothered about talking about that side of it now.
“We’ve got the players available that we’ve got and we’ll work with that situation to get the best outSwansea
come. My immediate focus is really to affect our own performance so it’s about hitting levels of performance which are achievable for us.
“I look at the Middlesbrough performance - of course, there are some areas that we can always improve on and there are some areas that set the base level for performance for me.
“We need to replicate the positive
aspect of performance more often and it’s very clear to see that we’ve not done that consistently and certainly, goals have been difficult to come by. It’s amazing how the psychological aspect of approaching a game can really affect players’ performance and being positive. That’s again something that I am and we are keen to reinforce with the players.”
will check on the fitness of Ryan Bennett ahead of the game after the defender missed the 1-0 midweek win over Coventry with a calf injury.
The Swans were rocked earlier in the week by news that on-loan American forward Jordan Morris will miss the rest of the season after damaging his anterior cruciate ligament.