General manager of football operations Lee O’Neill says the club continues to review what went wrong during the curtailed 2019/20 season in which the Blues finished 11th in League One on points per game, their lowest finish since 1952/53, having targeting automatic promotion.
Town led the division in the early stages of the campaign and briefly again in January but won only four of their final 21 League One matches, form a long way from their stated ambition of winning automatic promotion back to the Championship at the first attempt.
After a recent radio interview O’Neill was misquoted on social media suggesting automatic promotion wasn’t Town’s aim for the season but he says that was certainly the target.
"One hundred per cent and I’ve made that clear, people did misquote what I’d said in that particular interview,” he told TWTD.
"I said our aspiration and our target was to win the league, that’s fundamentally why we turn up to do our job, to win the league and get out of it. That was what we set out to do.
"If you want, our minimum aim was that we wanted to hit the play-offs and for most of the season we were in and around most of those objectives.
"Yes, we are doing and have done reviews looking at where we need to make amends for last year and we need to change things around because we can’t do what we did for the last two or three months of last season because that simply wasn’t good enough.”
When it was put to him that it was more than just the final few months, the record of four league wins in 21 stretched back to November, O’Neill responded: "I think at the end of January though we were top of the league. You can look at it and you might pick up a point away from home and people deem that as not a good result but at the end of the day the league table doesn’t lie, if you’re in and around it, you’re performing well.
"Yes, we needed to win more games, there’s no question about that, you can’t question that. Did we win enough games? No we didn’t.
"We all have pride in what we do and we need to make sure it’s better going forward, players more so than anybody else as well.
"They’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what it is and we’ve got to improve on where we finished last season, that’s for sure.”
Manager Paul Lambert was handed a five-year deal on New Year's Day. Was his position ever in any doubt given the disappointing campaign? "You know the commitment that Marcus had made to Paul from the football club’s perspective on that and there needs to be an element of time associated to that.
"And he’s always been that way with managers, giving them time to adapt and get their teams and squads ready to go to put the club’s best foot forward.
"Paul, if you were interviewing him now, he knows that wasn’t where the club should be and where the club should finish in League One and he and other staff members and players need to make sure we can address that and put it right, and we hope to do that as quickly as possible.”
Quizzed on why he thought the season went so badly awry, O’Neill says injuries were a big factor with Kane Vincent-Young and James Norwood among those to spend spells on the sidelines.
"There’s no hiding from it, we had some significant players that were out for long periods of time,” he said.
"We’d invested heavily in them earlier in the season and they weren’t available for us for the games for different reasons.
"I think if we’d had those players available then I do think it would have been a very different situation.
"And also we had a lot of home games left that we weren’t able to even play and they make a difference.
"You cry over spilt milk if you want, it’s happened and there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re all incredibly frustrated the way it ended and that frustration needs to be channeled and funnelled and ready to put the best foot forward for this season.”
Just over a year ago O’Neill told TWTD that the club’s medical and sports science staff would be compiling a report on the club’s injury situation with several recent seasons having been similar hit by fitness issues.
"I wish we could have a specific reasoning as to why that happens,” he said when asked about that report. "Unfortunately, it is very much what it is. You speak to a number of other clubs, they have the same issues.
"Everyone’s looking to address injuries and try and reduce them, so we look at lots of different areas, whether it’s the games or the training.
"Unfortunately it’s a contact sport and there are risks associated with that that we cannot plan for and unfortunately injuries do happen.
"The human body wasn’t designed necessarily to play football and it being a contact sport, injuries occurred.
"We’ve had a fair share of them and it’s been unfortunate and we are analysing every aspect of that from a medical and sports science point of view to try and reduce it but I don’t think you’ll ever take it off the table completely because it’s a contact.”
He added: "Ask Arsenal, ask Manchester United, over the last 10 years they’ve had players who have been injured, bigger clubs with more investments in certain areas and a lot more technology than we have and they’re still having the same issues.
"When you strip it all back, it’s very simple, is the body robust enough? Yes, but it’s not designed to certain things and when you do it it becomes a risk and in a contact sport it’s going to happen.
"You can put all the provisions in place and it will help minimise it but it won’t take the risk away.”
