West Brom midfielder Jake Livermore has insisted that the Baggies will be able to bounce back from their first defeat of the season in the Championship when the campaign resumes.
Valerien Ismael had managed to guide the Baggies through their opening ten Championship matches without suffering a single defeat and they were one of just two sides to achieve that in the division.
However, West Brom’s unbeaten start was brought to an end by a resilient and confident Stoke City side on Friday who managed to edge out the Baggies and secure a 1-0 win to congest things at the top of the table.
The Baggies will now need to show how they can respond to setbacks now when the campaign gets underway again after the international break. Responding to defeats in the right fashion is often the key for any side that goes on to achieve promotion to the Premier League.
Speaking to the Express and Star, Livermore has insisted that West Brom can take a lot of positives from their start to the season and he is confident that they can learn from their defeat at Stoke and bounce back after the international break.
He said: "I told the boys after the Stoke game to keep their heads up because after 11 games we have had to overcome a lot of different styles of play.
"Teams have made it very difficult for us. But on the whole we have reacted well.
"We will use Stoke as a big learning curve and when we come up against a team that plays like that again we will be more than equipped to deal with it.
"That was a tough night for us.
"But we won’t focus on the negatives, I think we have had so many positives from this block of games heading into the international break.
"I’ve said before, when we are winning games you can’t too get carried away – you can’t be scrapping us off the ceiling.
"And when results and performances go against us like they did at Stoke - we can’t be scraped off the floor either.
"We are learning in each and every game. Teams are coming at us and giving us different problems to solve. But overall we have reacted well."
The verdict
Livermore has been there and done it in the Championship and has a couple of promotions on his CV with Hull City and West Bom. He, therefore, knows all about what it takes over the course of a gruelling 46-game season to end up with a place in the Premier League.
These comments from Livermore therefore suggest that he is confident that the Baggies are displaying promotion qualities that he has seen in other squads that he has been a part of down the years.
West Brom will need to swiftly get back to winning ways to keep themselves inside the top two in the Championship table and if they can bounce straight back to winning ways then it will show a lot about the character within their squad.
This will be Ismael’s first major test as West Brom’s manager and he needs to show that he can learn from setbacks like the one against Stoke. His Barnsley side were able to respond to defeats in the right way last term, so confidence should be there that he can repeat that with the Baggies.