Club News

Mozza: Draw can be festive springboard

Scotland international backs team-mates to embrace Christmas schedule

JAMES Morrison hopes yesterday’s 0-0 draw with West Ham will provide a platform for Albion to build on during the hectic Christmas and New Year period. 

The Baggies host Norwich on Saturday, before trips to QPR on Boxing Day and Manchester United three days later are followed by a New Year's Day home clash with Fulham. 

And the 26-year-old midfielder believes experience in the squad of what it takes to make the festive fixture spell a successful one will enable Steve Clarke’s sixth-placed outfit to push on this term.  

“As a group of players we know what it’s like to play a lot of fixtures during the Christmas period,” said Morrison.

“This period can make your season and we’ve struggled in the past, at this time of year, so we’ve got to be on the ball and keep pushing forward.

“I don’t know why that is but under Robbie and Tony we struggled, and even under Roy to a certain extent, but we then seem to kick on in January.

“But we’ve got players here now that have been here long enough to know what it takes.

“We’re playing a mixture of teams, some are in form and some not. 

“We had a great start and the lads have done fantastically well but we’ve said before that it’s a long old season.

“We plan to keep pushing on and hopefully the fans will get behind us and make The Hawthorns a fortress again.

“We knew there was going to be a sticky patch and you can’t win every game but we want to keep our home form going and we did that yesterday with a point.”

He added: “We wanted to have a positive result and maybe a couple of weeks ago we might have lost that game.

“Stoke was almost exactly the same game and we lost that.

“It just didn’t fall for us yesterday, we had a lot of crosses into the box but it just didn’t fall for us.

“We’ve been working on that in training and we’ll continue to do that and look forward to Norwich. 

“I think teams have changed their approach because of the way we have been playing at home.

“West Ham came with a game plan today and they frustrated us.

“If you look at the Stoke game, and how they played against us, people are looking to upset us.

“If one had dropped for us then it would have been a different story.”