Captain Lee Carsley determined to avoid usual Coventry City drop-off

Oct 10 2010 by Andy Turner, Sunday Mercury

STILL striving for consistency, Coventry City have made a reasonable start to the new Championship campaign.

With ten games played and 15 points on the board, the Sky Blues are comfortably placed in ninth in the table, well within touching distance of the early-season pacesetters.

But captain Lee Carsley knows only too well that the club will need to buck the trend of recent seasons by doing much better in their next ten fixtures, when City have traditionally fallen by the wayside and struggled to recover to make anywhere near a fist of a promotion push.

Reflecting on the season so far, former Birmingham skipper Carsley said: “I think we have been OK. I wouldn’t say we have set the division alight but we are still finding our feet as a team.

“We have had a lot of new players come in and the gaffer has given us a lot of information to take on board which we are working on at the training ground, and hopefully the next ten games will be better than the last ten.

“We are in a good position at the minute. We are not looking over our shoulder and worried about getting points to keep away from the bottom of the league, we are very much looking forward.

“It is important we keep in touch with the top six. In the back of our minds, we know that, over the last few years, the next ten games have been poor.

“It is something I have been thinking about and certainly something that will be mentioned.”

He added: “It is all about consistency. I said before a ball was kicked at the start of the season that the best team won’t win the league, it will be the most consistent team that wins and the most consistent teams that finish in the top six.

“You will find the teams who have started like a house on fire usually fade away come Christmas and we have got to make sure we keep going.