Carlos Corberán says it crucial Albion pick up from where they left off before the FIFA World Cup break when they return to action on Monday night.
The Baggies travel north to take on Sunderland at the Stadium of Light (ko 8pm) in what will be their first Sky Bet Championship game in exactly a month.
Corberán’s men head into the clash with the Black Cats on the back of a run of three consecutive victories and three consecutive clean sheets, overcoming Blackpool, QPR and Stoke City in November.
And the Spaniard has challenged his players to show they’ve not lost any of their “rhythm” or “competitive habits” during the pause in domestic proceedings.
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Carlos said: “It’s so important for us to keep growing as a team. We are all together and we are all clear about the ideas that we have.
“We have spoken with the players about ways to play in order to give ourselves the best chance to get three points in games.
“Every time we are on the pitch we must give our best to try and get the three points and our mentality is never going to change.
“For me, my players have to give everything within themselves and not leave anything inside.
“Every minute is key in football. You cannot waste any moment of any match. You can impact a game from the first minute until the last so we need to be alert from the very start.
“It’s important for us to show that we haven’t lost any type of rhythm or competitive habits. We have to show from the first moment that we have the skill and the intelligence to adapt to any scenario in any game.”
The boss gave a clear outline of what the schedule has been like for his squad since the full-time whistle blew against Stoke on Saturday, November 12.
And Corberán says the three-week period on the training pitches both here in the United Kingdom and out in Spain have been hugely beneficial for so many reasons.
“Immediately after the Stoke game we used that first week to recover. After that, we’ve had three weeks of training work.
“The first and last week were spent here at our training ground and the middle week was spent in Spain.
“We’ve tried to work on developing our ideas during the break and letting the players know how we think we can have the best possible chance of winning more matches.
“We’ve had a couple of training matches too in order to give ourselves the best chance to be match fit ahead of our return to Championship action.
“It’s been a very positive period for us for so many reasons.
“We’ve had such a long period to work on the training pitch which means you can implement so many things on a tactical and a technical level.
“When you play so many games, like we do in the Championship, a lot of the time is spent on recovery a preparing for the next game. You have limited time to coach new ideas and new behaviours.
“We’ve been really focused on working on ideas on the training pitches and I hope we can now take those ideas into game situations.”
Monday’s hosts Sunderland returned to league action last weekend and recorded an impressive 3-0 home win over Millwall.
Corberán believes his side need to be wary of the confidence that victory may well have given the Black Cats.
“Sunderland will try to use their momentum from last weekend when they returned to action and won in front of their own fans to help them on Monday night.
“We want to try and use our advantage of having more time on the training pitch and being able to develop our players.
“Sunderland have kept the base of their team which helped them win promotion from League One last season.
“A lot of their players who start in the XI were in their XI last season when they achieved a big target which of course was promotion.
“Now with the new coach they have tried to add more attacking situations which make them very dangerous.
“I know that their performance will demand that we are at our very best on Monday night.”
