Blues boss Kieran McKenna admits a first win of the season at Brentford on Saturday would give his side a boost but says the most important thing is to following the process and trust that good things will come as a result.

Town, 17th in the table, have now gone eight matches without a victory, their longest ever winless run at the start of a top-flight season. Crystal Palace, Wolves and Southampton, promoted along with the Blues, are also still to claim all three points from a game during 2024/25.

“I think it would be a good boost, of course,” he said. “I’ve said it pretty much every week that we’ve got a result in half our games. If we had won one of the four games that we’ve drawn, the narrative would be different, even if we were on the same points total.

“But there’s no doubt that as the games go on, getting the first win, especially when the club hasn’t been in the Premier League for 22 years, haven’t won a game in the Premier League for that long, getting the first win will be a big boost to the group.

“I think that’s clear to see and to feel, but other than that, it’s not worth making any bigger than what it is, it’s about following the process and trying to prepare as well as we can for Brentford and give everything to that performance.

“Trusting that good things will come. Over the course of the last couple of seasons, we had a spell last season in the Championship where we had one win in nine games and then we had nine wins in 10 games immediately after.

“If you asked me what we changed drastically in that period, probably not a lot, it’s very fine margins in football. A couple of times the margins go your way, you get some players back from injury, some players come into the team and do well, things can change.

“In League One we had a period again of maybe one win in nine games and then we won 13 out of 14 and smashed almost every EFL record in terms of the run. What did we do differently? Not a whole pile.

“Of course, you tweak a few things, some people come into the team, some people drop out for different reasons and things can change pretty quick.

“I’m not saying we’re on the cusp of that sort of a run in the Premier League but I believe that you have to focus on doing the right things. Try and do the right things in training, try and do the right things every game.

“And if you do enough of the right things over a long period of time, then over the course of that time, then things will turn in your favour.”

McKenna was asked whether his players are nervous going into games as they look for that first win.

“He had a very good game last week, but if Cameron Burgess is landing back from Japan on Thursday morning and making a Premier League debut after a journey’s that taken him from the National League to the Premier League and he has one day to get ready to play against Calvert-Lewin and fulfil his dream of playing in the Premier League, if he doesn’t have some nerves prior to that game, then he’s probably some version of a psychopath!” McKenna joked.

“We’ve got a lot of players, probably pretty much every game, we’ve had a player making a Premier League debut, every game we’ve got players coming off the bench making Premier League debuts.

“We’ve got players playing with players they haven’t played with before and we’ve got an awful lot of players who are climbing into this division, who have maybe climbed a long way in their career to this division to get to this point.

“So, if there aren’t some nerves, some anxiety before the game, even in the game, then they’re probably not competitive sports people.

“Would those nerves be any different if we were sitting fifth in the table and pushing for the Champions League? Maybe, but we had a lot of nerves in the team when we were going for promotion in League One. The team was nervous last year when we were going for promotion from the Championship.

“Dealing with nerves is something that you have to deal with individually and deal with as a group and use it in a positive manner.

“For sure, you can look at a couple of the moments in the Everton game and say there were a few mistakes in there that looked like nervous mistakes but they’re human beings and with the step that so many of them are taking at the moment there’s always going to be that, so it’s up to us how we help them individually and how we help as a group to make sure we’re supporting each other in the best way possible.”

While Town won most of their games during the previous two years as they climbed the divisions, McKenna points out it hasn’t always been plain sailing.

“I think there’s different aspects to look at that,” he reflected. “I know the last couple of years, it can look like the progression here has been completely linear but there have been periods where we haven’t won and we’ve come out of those periods by sticking to doing the right things and sticking to our processes day-to-day.

“That’s part of it. Going into the season, we knew as a newly promoted team that the season was going to feel very different, we weren’t going to win so many games.

“I think the team that finishes 17th in the Premier League usually get between eight and nine wins over the course of 38 games over the course of a 10-month season, so that’s one win a month, if you want to do some very loose maths.

“It means you might not win for three months but you might win three games in a row and you’re on course, Everton last year finished on almost mid-table points and they didn’t win for 11 games at one stage, and that’s with a team that we played last week that have over 2,000 Premier League appearances amongst them.

“You know going into the season, you’re going to have periods where you don’t win for a stretch, you pre-frame these things, you speak about them as a group, you try and lay down how you’re going to be in those instances.

“And then you set your process for how you’re going to deal with it, and for us how we deal with it is if things aren’t going our way, we try and double down the training, how well we train, how hard we train, how well we prepare, how we stick together as a group and how we just focus on the next game.

“That’s what’s brought us success as a group before, that’s what I think will bring us success again this year.

“Beyond that, it is more of a challenge doing it with more new players in the group, for sure. It’s more of a challenge doing at a level where the team are super-strong every week, but I don’t think the process drastically changes, so that’s what we’re trying to stick to at the moment.”

McKenna says the Blues have come from a very different place from Southampton and Leicester, who had only had one year in the Championship having been in the Premier League for a number of seasons prior to that, and the likes of Brentford and Brighton, who have established themselves having been promoted in a few years earlier.

“I think everyone’s journey is different,” he continued. “I don’t think you can compare our situation this year to Southampton and Leicester’s, let alone teams in different seasons.

“I think more naturally, everyone’s got their own journey. Look at Brentford and Brighton as two teams that people have as role models at the moment for teams coming up to the Premier League and you can’t strip it from the context of both of them having four or five seasons at the top of the Championship, investing a lot, building their team and so didn’t have to make so many changes when they got to the Premier League.

“That’s very, very different from a team that were mid-table League One two years ago and are now in the Premier League.

“You look at both of those teams and they both have world class data systems that give them a competitive advantage in the market and have done some incredible recruitment and both world class data systems come from the same source, so they both have their own journey, their own strengths, their own things as a club that makes them unique.

“And at the moment it’s pretty easy to generalise across all clubs because the teams that came up last year didn’t manage to stay in the division but [comparing] our situation this year to Burnley’s, who were a parachute payment club [in the previous] season is very, very different, as was Burnley’s to Luton’s last season coming up.

“I know our journey, I know it happened very, very quickly and none of us would change it for the world, that’s for sure. But we knew coming into this season it was going to be a big, big challenge, we’re in the middle of this challenge.

“We’ve done some really positive things already in the first couple of months, but we know that we’ve got another big step that we’re going to have to make to be competitive all season, and that’s where our focus is.”

Photo: Action Images

SquamishBlue added 18:26 - Oct 24 Totally right....it's ALL about the process, it's not just for the players, but the fans too! The victories will come. The right process, and buy in from all the players will mean we DO stay up this year and then we continue to develop and build upon this extraordinary foundation and momentum to build a bigger, deeper, versatile squad with resiliency for the long haul. Ashton has shown us how to build a winning organization from top to bottom, soup to nuts....and McKenna has shown us how to build a winning team...all the pieces are there...! The Premier League is where we belong!

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victorysquad added 18:41 - Oct 24 Speaks so well, we are all 100% behind the manager, the coaches and the players. All i ask is to show belief, we are a very good football team and that has not changed over night. Let our football do the talking, let the ball do the work more. We have to be quicker, more accurate, stronger, faster etc but we can do that. Lets be aggressive on Saturday, press hard and move the ball quickly and see where it takes us

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MK1 added 14:28 - Oct 25 No doubts about it coming good. You haven't let us down yet Kieran and I full expect you to tweak the system to cope with the higher level.
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