Garry Monk and his squad have targeted getting out of our minus points deficit by next weekend.
Victory over Birmingham today means we have reduced our start-of-season 12-point punishment to four points and, with home games against Brentford and Luton in the coming days, Monk has revealed the aim is to wipe out the deficit in those two matches.
Speaking after the 1-0 win over former club Birmingham, Monk said: “We know it’s an important week – our aim, as difficult as it is, is to try to get out of the points deficit by the end of the week. It’s not going to be easy but that’s the target we have set ourselves.”
Reflecting on this afternoon’s three points, Monk said\; “It was a very good performance and I thought we dominated the game.
“We were very unlucky not to have a second or third goal. We dominated defensively and didn’t really suffer anything on our goal.
“We were creating opportunities, a couple of decisions could have gone for us in those moments but they didn’t.
“The only thing is that when you don’t quite get that second or third goal, like you see all the time in this league there’s that last six or seven minutes where they throw all their bodies up front and it’s a scramble, what you’ve got to do in that moment is dig in, stand up and be counted.
“We showed the dominance and then when we had to show our character and resilience which we have talked about a lot, we did so.
“We deserved that today and were very unlucky not to win by more.”