Carlos Corberán insists "belief was key" for West Bromwich Albion on Saturday as they secured a place in the Sky Bet Championship Play-Offs with a 3-0 victory over Preston North End.
The Baggies knew three points at The Hawthorns would be enough to earn them a shot at promotion to the Premier League.
Goals from Alex Mowatt, Kyle Bartley and Darnell Furlong sealed a semi-final showdown with Southampton, and Carlos says he was delighted with the players' performance and attitude.
The boss said: “I had the feeling that this was the first target of the season - to finish in the Play-Off positions.
“We know we have spent many weeks in fifth position, but always in football you have to make evaluations about the last game and fortunately we achieved one position we probably deserved.
“For many weeks we’ve been there, but now we move onto our next target.
“These games aren’t easy to manage because you know you have to achieve a positive result to achieve what you want to achieve, and sometimes you need to have your mind ready to be focused on the performance and not the result, and make the result the consequence of the performance.
“The team in general were better than the opponent today, understood the game better, managed the game better, and of course in football the goals bring you the positivity which you need sometimes to believe you can achieve.
“Until that moment (Mowatt’s penalty), the team tried to create attacks but in the moments we wanted to create attacks we didn’t create many chances. When we had chances we were missing the chances.
“So it was important to score the goal that brought a lot of confidence to the players.
“These were three important points that gave us the possibility to achieve what we have.
“Every point we have achieved is the consequence of a lot of work, sacrifice, determination, which are important things you need to show on the football pitch.
“The second thing was perform because we need to perform well and the performance of the team is based on the understanding of the game, to manage the different game situations in attack and defence.
“And probably the key aspect was belief because you need to not only believe when you get a chance, but when you concede them too, not only when you win the tackle but when you lose them too, not only when you concede two because in football that can be the key to believe and keep competing until the last second of any game.
“We will use today to recover, probably tomorrow too, but after this we know we are going to prepare for the game with all of the possibilities we can have, and analyse so we can make the best game.
“Achieving play-offs is not our target. It’s the first step of a bigger target.”
