Brandon Thomas-Asante says he’s “super happy” to have returned to Albion action after missing three Sky Bet Championship matches with a minor hamstring complaint.
The striker came off the bench in the second-half of the club’s 1-1 draw with Cardiff City in South Wales on Wednesday night - his first appearance since the 2-0 triumph over Middlesbrough at The Hawthorns in late February.
And Brandon, a popular figure within the squad and among the Baggies supporters, admitted it felt “awful” not being able to contribute on the pitch over the last few weeks.
He said: “It’s felt awful being away recently, but I’m super happy to be back.
“As you know we’re a tight-knit group and even though I was away, it was still good to be in and around the boys and now I can contribute something once again by playing.
"I’ll take this in my stride and into the break over the next couple of weeks and we’ll go again.
“I felt really good out there and now I’m back on the pitch, it’s just about getting back in the swing.
“I wish there was a game in a few days, but I’ll use this break to get a bit more strength, speed and sharpness into me and use it as an opportunity to not only get back to the level I was at, but get past that and keep pushing.”
The point at the Cardiff City Stadium halted a run of five successive away defeats for Carlos Corberán’s men, but Thomas-Asante said the group was disappointed not to have won the encounter.
“It was a bit of a sombre dressing room.
“We always set ourselves high expectations and with the way we felt we dominated the game, we definitely know we could’ve got more points.
“That would’ve left us in good stead for the international break and in a better position to climb the table. But it’s still positive and at the same time we know we have a job to do when we get back.
“Teams do respect us a lot as a group and they often set up quite defensively. That makes it hard to break teams down at times and that does call on us attackers to think of things and be creative.
“We have the players to do that and we have higher expectations of ourselves than what we showed, but we’re working on it and we’ll look to build on it in the next game.
“We just focus on ourselves and we know we’re all going to end up on 46 games by May.
“Teams around us will play, we’re going to have days when we play and they’re not and vice-versa until the end of the season.
“But what we know is, when we’re on the pitch, we want to take as much as we can from every game which is why we’re so frustrated to only have a point.
“But with that mentality, I think it’ll get us to where we need to be. Just being focused on ourselves, because if you’re focused on the rest of the table, it can distract us from what we’re doing.
“We know where we want to be and we’ll do what we can to get there.”
