Greening: We must raise our game against strugglers

Jonathan Greening has admitted West Brom need to start picking up points against their fellow Premiership strugglers to bolster their chances of staying in the top flight.

Albion have produced a string of impressive performances to record victories against the likes of Arsenal, Manchester City, Tottenham and Wigan.

But it has been a different story against sides in the lower reaches of the table and the Baggies’ latest setback was Saturday’s 1-0 home reversal at the hands of bottom-placed Sunderland.

Greening said: “We’ve got a good record against top teams like Man City and Tottenham. But we lost again on Saturday to a team that is down at the bottom and no-one was happy at all.

“We seem to do better when we’re underdogs rather than favourites. It’s strange because the better the team we’re playing against, the better we seem to play.

“Maybe those teams don’t battle as hard as someone like Sunderland and let us play our football, and that’s something we have to address.”

Albion are without a game this weekend after their exit from the FA Cup but Greening is itching for the Baggies to bounce back from the Black Cats' reversal at Charlton on Tuesday..

He said: “We’re all just desperate for the next game to come along. We won there 4-1 last season. It was a good performance and the start of positive things for us.”

Albion manager Bryan Robson will demand a positive response at The Valley after seeing his side throw away the opportunity of picking up back-to-back wins for the first time.

He said: “I keep mentioning to the players how important it is to put together back-to-back wins. We had a perfect opportunity after winning at Wigan the previous week. We threw it away but now we have to bounce back.”