Tony Mowbray has stressed the importance of picking up regular victories at The Hawthorns with Albion chasing a spot in the top six of the Sky Bet Championship.
The Baggies have 11 second-tier matches left to play in 2024/25, six of which will be in front of their own supporters in B71, starting with Saturday’s showdown against QPR (ko 3pm).
Albion, who are one of several sides in the division hoping to qualify for the play-offs, have won six of their last eight home games, earning 19 points from the 24 on offer during that time.
Mowbray insists his team need to remain focused on the job at hand and believes encounters at The Hawthorns are going to be crucial to their chances of achieving their targets.
The boss said: “We have to keep our points tally ticking along. The league is so, so tight this season and there are so many teams fighting for those spots in the play-offs.
“If you lose a game, there’s a very good chance you’ll drop down in the league, but, in the same breath, if you win a game, there’s a great chance to either jump in front of teams or open up a bit of gap.
“Teams will be playing each other and taking points off each other.
“Who knows, we may even end up in a situation where we go into the final game of the season against Luton still not knowing what will happen.
“We obviously want to avoid that scenario. We want to make sure we’re in the top six and we’ve secured what we want to secure as quickly as possible.
“We understand that somewhere along the line we are going to draw a game or lose a game, but we also understand all the other teams around us will lose and draw games too.
“We can’t let things drag us down at the this stage of the season and we need to stay positive. We have to have respect for all of these teams and we’ve still got to play a lot of them, such as Coventry City, Bristol City and Norwich City just to name a few.
“When we have the power of The Hawthorns behind us, we have to utilise that and make sure we don’t have an off day and drop points. When the chances come, we have to be clinical and secure three points in our home games.
“Away, we have to go and do what we did at Leeds last weekend and throw some punches and see if we can score some goals and win some matches.”
This weekend’s visitors QPR have performed much more competitively this term in the Championship than in previous years, putting themselves in a position to record a top-half finish, or maybe even more.
They’ll arrive in the West Midlands on the back of consecutive narrow 2-1 defeats to Portsmouth (A) and Sheffield United (H), but Mowbray says they’re a team with a number of “dangerous” players who can “win them football matches”.
Tony added: “QPR have some dangerous players – players who can win them football matches. We have to be mindful of that.
“They are dangerous on set-plays and they’ve got some big lads in their team.
“We have to hope the way we’ve been asking the team to play over recent weeks is going to give us an advantage. Hopefully we can play a lot of the game in their half, push them back and score some goals.
“I want all the players to enjoy the games we play in. We’re all looking forward to the last few months of the season and I feel like the lads are in a good place. There’s a good energy around training and we’re looking forward to this weekend’s game.
“We’re respectful of QPR because we know how tough they are to play against, but we’re hopeful that we’ve got enough to get the three points which would, of course, be really big for us at this stage.”
