Valérien Ismaël has demanded the same level of “desire and motivation” from his players at Peterborough as they’ve shown in the first four Sky Bet Championship games.
Albion head to the Weston Homes Stadium on Saturday night unbeaten in the league and off the back of three consecutive victories against Luton Town, Sheffield United and Blackburn Rovers.
Peterborough are competing in the second tier of English football once again having finished runners-up in League One last term, with Darren Ferguson’s men picking up four points from their first four games.
And Ismaël is expecting a stern test against the newly-promoted Posh, warning his side must do “everything properly” in order to give themselves the best possible opportunity of collecting another victory.
He said: “We will need maximum effort once again at Peterborough on Saturday night.
“We are in good shape, the mindset is really good and the atmosphere within the group is great.
“We need to put another energetic performance in and make sure our mentality is the same as it has been in our opening four games.
“It’ll be another tough away game. We need to make sure the desire and the motivation is at 100 per cent to give us the best chance of getting a win.
“The first team have had the chance to get a rest in this week by not playing on Wednesday night against Arsenal.
“They’ve been able to train well and focus completely on Peterborough.
“They had a massive season last year. We know they will give absolutely everything in the game. We need to make sure we stay at our level, do everything properly and then hope our quality shines through at any moment of the game.”
No Championship team has scored more goals than Albion’s 11 ahead of matchweek five.
Five different players have all found the net so far this season, with the Baggies also benefitting from two own goals.
But the boss believes there’s still plenty more to come from his group in an attacking sense.
“We have scored the most goals heading into this round of fixtures, but when you look at it, we could have scored a lot more goals.
“We are on the way to where we want to be which is to become a complete team.
“The offensive part is obviously a very important part of that. If you want to win games then you have to score plenty of goals.
“We have already shown our quality, but we are not finished with our work.
“Grady, we hope, will have the breakthrough soon. Jordan Hugill has arrived on loan and he will help us. Matty scored his first goal last weekend at Blackburn and KG is hungry to score more goals.
“We know that we can score at any time in the game through set-pieces. Our defenders are dangerous from set-pieces.
“We need to stay focused on our principles and use everything we have to keep scoring goals.”
