West Brom planning best way to get Matt Phillips ready for next season

The 26-year-old was a revelation last term following his £5million move from Queens Park Rangers, but he missed 10 of the last 13 games with hamstring trouble.

The Baggies only won two of those fixtures, as Tony Pulis’s side struggled to deal without Phillips’s power and pace on the wing.

Although he was nearing fitness towards the end of the season, after speaking with Scotland boss Gordon Strachan, Phillips decided it was in his best interests to stay off international duty this summer.

The winger hasn’t been named in Strachan’s squad for Saturday’s showdown with England, and has instead been undergoing continued rehabilitation at the Albion training ground.

“He’s obviously proven to be a very big player for us, so we need to keep him fit,” said director of performance Mark Gillett. “We need to get 35-plus games out of him next season.

“He was nearly ready at the end of the season but he hadn’t played and he wasn’t quite there.

“He’s taken the sensible decision to come in. He wants to be at his best when he’s playing for Scotland and he didn’t feel he would be.

“He hasn’t played for a couple of months, so it’s an understandable decision. Him and Gordon probably had a discussion about it. It was a joint decision, and a sensible thing to do.”

Pulis chased Phillips for the best part of 12 months, but he eventually joined the club at the start of July 2016.

He arrived in time to travel out to Austria with the rest of the squad for Pulis’s annual pre-season summer training camp, and Gillett reckons that gave him a good base for the season.

“Austria is really important for us, the more new players we can have in Austria, the better for us,” he said.

“Matt did really well, and we were pleased to get him in the club nice and early. Allan Nyom and Hal Robson-Kanu joined on deadline day last year and we didn’t have any time to work on resilience and robustness, although both did pretty well to get up to speed quickly.

“Say we make a £20m signing, you want them to play all 38 league games, so the earlier we can get them through the door the better.”