Blues boss Roy Keane admitted that his side are a long way from the play-offs after Sunday’s dismal 4-1 derby defeat at Norwich. The Town manager is concerned that with some tricky fixtures coming up, his side could drop even further down the table from their current position of 16th.
Keane said: "At the moment I don’t think we’re capable of going on a run like we’ve seen from other teams, Burnley and Derby for example. I’ve been saying for a month now that we’re only a few points off the play-offs, but if anything that gap’s going to get wider because we’ve got a tough run of games.
"We’ve got injuries andwe don’t look like we’re going to score many goals, so we’re a long way off the play-offs yet.”
The Blues boss says last season’s poor run was his hardest time in management and that he constantly looks at his own performance: "It was pretty tough last year when we didn’t win for 14 games, but the expectation this year was that it would be better. I analyse my position every day, whether we’ve won three or four or lost one or two, whatever it might be. That doesn’t change.
"We’ve got to try and turn things around and it’s not going to get any easier. We’ve got West Brom on Wednesday.”
Keane believes the line-up he fielded at Norwich was decent enough: "I think our starting XI was pretty strong, I’ve been saying for the last few months that we’ve got too many young players. I think it was an experienced team, no Tom Eastman as he’s injured, as are Luke and Connor.
"But going down to 10 men made it very hard for us. Having said that, you still have to get punished for it and Norwich are a good team and are in good form and they punished us.
"When it was 2-1 we dropped back a little bit and tried to soak up the pressure. Having lost a centre-half, we had to reshuffle and we missed Jack Colback in midfield, so it had a massive knock-on effect.
"They put us under a bit of pressure, put a lot of balls in the box and they’re pretty good at that anyway, even if we’d had 11 players. A tough afternoon all round for everyone.”
Chief executive Simon Clegg gave Keane his backing just over a week ago, but the Irishman says he’s aware that patience eventually runs out: "I think we’ve heard that from clubs before about managers and the next day they’re gone. I take any comments that might come with a pinch of salt.”
Moving on to Wednesday’s Carling Cup quarter-final against West Brom, Keane says he’s not sure who will be in his squad: "God knows what players we’ll have for Wednesday. We’ve a lot of injuries, suspensions, two or three players who started today won’t be available because they’re cup-tied. It’s going to be tough. West Brom could come down and flex their muscles.
"They had a pretty good weekend, winning 4-1, and they have a chance of getting to a semi-finals. It’s another big game for us on Wednesday, but we’ve had a decent cup run, although this is the first time we’ve played a team from a higher league.
"We’ll find out a lot about our players on Wednesday in terms of their characters and personalities because we question them all the time, asking, ‘what have you got?’. We’ll know a bit more about the group on Wednesday.”