Town fans will know all too well where momentum from League One can take you and it’s safe to say their first opponents this season will have exactly that. The Midlands Blues finished the League One season with a record breaking 111 points, suffering just three defeats all year.

The similarities with Town don’t stop there. Like Ipswich, Birmingham entrusted their return to the Championship to a man with no senior managerial experience in Chris Davies. Again, like Kieran McKenna, Davies had a wealth of coaching experience having worked under Brendan Rogers at Swansea, Liverpool, Celtic and Leicester, whilst also having a brief spell as first team coach at Reading before most recently being senior assistant coach to Ange Postecoglu at Tottenham.

His philosophy with Birmingham is clear. He likes his team to have a lot of the ball with both full-backs pushing high to create attacking overloads.

They dominated the ball so much last season that they averaged 67% possession across the course of the campaign. On top of that, they averaged 10.36 passes per spell of possession, the highest in the league and just under three passes per spell more than Bolton in second place.

Goalkeepers

Former Leeds, Burnley and Sheffield Wednesday keeper Bailey Peacock-Farrell started the season in goal playing the first seven games before being dropped for the more experienced Ryan Allsop having made three errors leading to goals and keeping just one clean sheet in the 2-0 victory against Rotherham.

That proved to be the correct decision as Allsop went on to keep 20 clean sheets in the league conceding just 20 goals. However, despite having 151 Championship appearances, he could well have to play second fiddle to new loan signing James Beadle this season.

The England U21 international has joined on loan from Brighton off the back of winning the U21 Euros and making the team of the tournament this summer. He will be aiming to come in and immediately claim the number one jersey, having made 38 starts for Sheffield Wednesday last season following the extension of his half-season loan from the campaign before until the end of 2024/25. He kept 17 clean sheets in that year and a half spell and Birmingham will be hoping for more of the same this year.

Defenders

Defence is clearly an area that Birmingham have looked to strengthen following promotion and the signing of Phil Neumann, alongside the permanent additions of Taylor Gardner-Hickman and Alfons Sampsted, who were both on loan last season go some way to doing that.

Neumann joins on a free from 2.Bundesliga side Hannover and will assume the position on the right side of defence that at times becomes a hybrid right-back in Davies's system. This is something he will be comfortable with having operated in a similar role in Germany.

It remains to be seen whether Christophe Klarer, a man who also has history playing in Germany including a spell with Town’s German friends Fortuna Dusseldorf, will be his partner or his competition in that role with the tall right-footed Austrian being an ever present in that position in the League One season.

The two other members of the squad that can play centre-back are Dion Sanderson, who struggled for game time last season, and Krystian Bielik, who was also largely used as a sub towards the back end of last season and who is also an option in defensive midfield.

Yet more quality has been added to that position with Eiran Cashin joining on loan from Brighton. The 23-year-old only played 19 minutes of Premier League football last season for the Seagulls, having joined in January following an incredibly impressive spell at Derby, where he was being constantly touted for a Premier League move. Unlike the rest of the centre-backs in the squad, he is also left-footed so will bring more of a balance to the backline.

Ethan Laird and Alex Cochrane are likely to start the season in the full-back berths and both are excellent attacking full-backs at Championship level. Laird in particular excelled with four goals and four assists in League One whilst Cochrane was an ever-present last year, starting 41 out of 42 matches.

Lee Buchanan and the aforementioned Icelander Sampsted represent the depth on either side, whilst new signing Bright Oseyi-Samuel has played everywhere apart from centre-back in his career and could be an option at right-back, where he largely played when he was at Fenerbache, but could equally be used anywhere else on the pitch.

Another player who can play all over the pitch is Gardner-Hickman. The former Bristol City man started the season at right-back but then featured in all of the midfield positions and even on the wings, where he was the most productive, scoring all three of his goals last season when he was out on the left and able to cut inside.

Midfield

A lot of Ipswich Town’s problems last season came due to a lack of physical presence in midfield and this could be one of Birmingham’s problems in the Championship this season. In Seung-Ho Paik and Tomoki Iwata they had two of the best passers of the ball in League One.

Between them they made 123 passes into the penalty area, both averaging around 85% pass completion. Paik delivered 148 crosses whilst Iwata scored seven goals, four of which came from outside the box.

This is fine in games where the Blues dominated possession but in games where they needed a bit more aggression in there or needed to see out a game, Marc Leonard was deployed instead.

The 23-year-old Scotsman is someone who thrives off the ball using his energy to press high, something that saw him win 63% of his ground duels.

Birmingham have added to that midfield unit with the loan signing of Tommy Doyle from Wolves. The 23-year-old former Manchester City youngster played 24 times for Wolves last season but only three of those were starts.

He does have history in the Championship, however, and impressed in the 2022/23 season whilst on loan at Sheffield United, contributing towards 10 goals (four scored, six assisted) across all competitions.

It remains to be seen exactly where he’ll fit into this Birmingham side but is no doubt a very good signing for a Championship club.

What he will provide is a very different profile to 6ft 3in attacking midfielder Willum Thor Willumsson, who, alongside having one of my favourite names in football, also scored six goals and assisted six in a very good League One campaign, providing a focal point for the Birmingham attack that their more natural strikers didn’t possess.

By having the target man further back, it also makes him harder to pick up as defenders have to step in or midfielders have to drop deep. Interestingly though, none of his six goals were scored with his head.

When it wasn’t Willumsson playing in that role, it was Lyndon Dykes who filled in, the former QPR striker having been dropped deeper in his time there, but also able to operate as an out and out striker as needed.

The Blues have signed Kanya Fujimoto, following the expiry of his contract with Gil Vicente in Portugal, to provide a completely different option in there as Davies looks to tweak his squad for the Championship. Another Japanese midfielder to add to the mix, he finished last season with five goals and five assists.

Attackers

The wings are the most interesting area of this Birmingham team. With Cochrane playing so high and providing width down the left-hand side left season, Davies opted for an inverted left winger with a more natural winger the other side.

Without doubt their marquee signing of the summer so far has been the return of Demarai Gray. Now 29, the Jamaican international is back in the Championship having been one of many players to make the move to Saudi Arabia after holding his own in the Premier League with first Leicester and then Everton.

His time in Saudi, it’s safe to say, wasn’t prolific with just one goal in 28 appearances but with Davies’s coaching Blues fans will be hoping he can get back up to speed quickly and discover the ability that made him a threat.

He joins a wide unit that also contains former Rangers player Scott Wright, who was largely back up on the right-wing last year, and Keshi Anderson, who had a productive season with nine goals and eight assists in all competitions. The one question mark over the 30-year-old, however, is whether he is good enough for the Championship with just four goals in 61 appearances in his career at that level.

Someone who we know can cut it at Championship level is newly crowned U21 Euros champion Jay Stansfield, who was charged with leading the line for the Young Lions in Liam Delap’s absence.

Stansfield scored 12 goals in the 2023/24 Championship season and added another 19 last season, albeit nine of those came from the spot.

He was ably supported by Alfie May, who chipped in with another 16 goals to take his League One total to 89. He’s never played in the Championship and that is set to continue as he’s departed for Lee Grant’s Huddersfield.

The final member in the attacking unit is Tyler Roberts, who, after injury hit spells at Leeds and QPR, looks to have built his fitness up more with the Blues and was used in various positions last season, off the left, as a second striker and leading the line. He has Championship pedigree with 86 appearances to his name and will be a handy player to be able to bring off the bench.

Roberts's game time could be limited further with the arrival of Kyogo Furuhashi. Adding to the Japanese element of the squad the 30-year-old joins from Rennes after an unsuccessful six months in France where he only made six appearances, five of which were from the bench.

His numbers at former club Celtic, however, are what makes this one of the standout Championship signings of the summer. He netted 85 times in 165 appearances for the Bhoys and has regularly impressed in his Champions League appearances.

Davies's biggest problem will be figuring out how he fits both him and Stansfield in the same team, an issue that will be eased a bit by the fact that both are comfortable playing off he left of a front four as well as being the main striker.

The Teams

Having avoided too many injuries during pre-season Town were hit fairly hard in the last friendly against Auxerre. Conor Townsend and Jaden Philogene both limped off in that one whilst Leif Davis and Omari Hutchinson missed the trip completely.

I expect Davis to play this one and if Hutchinson hasn’t got the move he wants then I see no reason why he won’t start on the right with Jack Clarke on the left.

Given Birmingham’s threats down the left, I wouldn’t mind seeing Dara O’Shea shifting to right-back with Luke Woolfenden coming in, but given the pre-season team selections, it seems likely Ben Johnson will keep his place there.

For Birmingham,Allsop seems to have kept the number one shirt in pre-season with Beadle having extra time off after the U21 Euros and it looks likely that Doyle will start as the ‘10’ to try and find pockets of space as opposed to the physical Willumsson and Stansfield will lead the line.

Prediction

It’s a tough start to life back in the Championship but confidence will be high after an unbeaten pre-season where McKenna’s tactical tweaks seem to have us well placed to beat a possession focused Blues side.

Last season, they often played a high line and looked to suffocate teams but the George Hirst-Sammie Szmodics pairing is the perfect antidote to that. I’m going for a 2-1 win with a goal apiece for the duo.

algarvefan added 21:49 - Aug 7 Great Blog, thank you. I think at this stage I'd settle for a draw, a more likely outcome I think, but hope you are right about the win.
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