Focus On Pep Clotet's Birmingham Revolution

“We are growing, trying to develop a young side”

- John Wragg

PEP Clotet made a list after Birmingham City went to Brentford, had one attempt on goal and won on the opening day of the season.

He wasn’t happy. He wrote down all the things that his team needed to do to be better.

“They call it in England ‘smash and grab’. I love that expression, but it is not the way I want to play,” explains Clotet.

“I have replayed that Brentford game many times. That is not what we wanted.

“So, then, we made a list of all the things we needed to be better at in order to not accept that game as a good result. That for us has been huge.”

Gradually Clotet, who is from Barcelona, one of the homes of fantastic football, has been building a team that is good to watch.

He is trying to take Blues from the working man’s club they were under Garry Monk to something a bit classier, a bit slicker.

The peak, so far, came in the midweek 1-0 home win over Blackburn. The winner was sweet, built carefully from the back, involved five players, a clever back-heeled pass, and a close-range headed finish from a fullback, Maxime Colin, for his first goal in 19 months.

It left Birmingham 11th going into this weekend’s games, three points off the play-off places.

Getting involved in the promotion race is probably a stretch too far this early into Clotet’s re-boot, but not impossible.

Not one of the top seven in the Championship won a game in midweek.

Sheffield Wednesday, managed ironically by Monk, gatecrashed their way to third, Bristol City fourth and Swansea and Nottingham Forest fell out of the elite places altogether.

So it can be done. The difference is Clotet has to do it with style.

That was his brief when he succeeded Monk, astonishingly sacked after the good job he’d done, in June.