West Brom boss Tony Pulis calls team meeting over blip in form

Although Albion’s head coach has been delighted with his ‘over-achieving’ team, back-to-back defeats since 40 points have sent alarm bells ringing.

Pulis senses an opportunity this season to change the mentality of the club from one where staying up is just enough.

“For the last seven years this club has been in the Premier League that’s been the target and nothing else,” said Pulis. “We want to go further than that, and we have to go further than that.

“We have to get a group of players in who understand that. Get there, never take it for granted, but then, if we’ve got games left over, let’s push on.”

Pulis was worried a few senior players who have been at the club a long time had ‘psychologically’ dropped off since reaching 40 points. But he refused to criticise his players and the team meeting reassured him they were ready to get back on the boil.

However, he admitted it would be hard with several of the big teams still to play and injuries to key players Matt Phillips and James Morrison – both of whom are doubts for today’s match with Arsenal - impacting his shallow squad.

“We had a good meeting on Monday and talked about the situation,” he revealed. “Listen, we’ve got some really tough games, and we understand that.

“In the last 10 games we play five of the top six, so it’s going to be a tough run-in.

“As I said when we were doing well, as sure as eggs are eggs, we’ll hit a spell where we lose games.

“The important thing is to dust yourselves down and move on to the next one.

“The players have done fantastically well. If there’s something that might have raised its ugly head is that we don’t have a depth within the group.

“Unfortunately Morrison has hurt his ankle this week and Matty has been a big miss.

“But we want them to reach a level where they get the points they deserve because they’ve been fantastic for two-thirds of the season. We don’t want it to drop off, we certainly don’t want that.”