Conor Townsend urges West Brom to be brave after tough start

Left-back Townsend, one of the club’s longest-servers, revealed the head coach demands “personality” when it comes to a style of play of building possession from the back that the boss is looking for this term.

The Baggies have opened up with 2-1 defeats on the road in league and cup and kick off their home campaign at The Hawthorns against Swansea tomorrow – boosted by an impressive 18,000 season ticket sales – looking for a first victory.

“The gaffer talks about personality and characters in the team, that’s not just running around and tacking, it’s getting on the ball, being brave to take the ball in difficult areas and make choices,” Townsend said. “I thought the lads did that in the second half at Stoke, I thought we were unlucky to lose the game, but there’s positives to take into tomorrow, there’s no time for moping about, it’s the start of the season and we’re building.”

Townsend crossed well for Brandon Thomas-Asante to equalise at the Bet365 Stadium before the visitors were pegged back 60 seconds later after midfielder Alex Mowatt was caught on the ball.

“The way the gaffer wants us to play there’s an element of risk to situations,” Townsend said. “We got caught on the ball, it can happen in football, we need to eradicate those, but we need to be brave, we can’t go into our shells.

“If we go into our shell and stop playing and start playing long balls, we’ve not got the players to do that, we’re not that team.

“Hopefully our pace is bouncing on Saturday and we give the fans plenty to shout about.

“It’s fantastic, to get over 18,000 with the cost of living crisis is brilliant, we just ask they stick with us.

“The goals conceded have been mostly mistakes, myself included, and Ceddy (Kipre), Mowy, we don’t want to or mean to make mistakes, if we can eradicate those mistakes we can be competitive.”