Birmingham City emphatically bounced back to winning ways at St Andrew’s with a dominant Championship victory over Portsmouth. <\/p>\n
Paik Seung-Ho opened the scoring within the first 10 minutes before Tomoki Iwata, captain Chrisoph Klarer and substitute Keshi Anderson struck after the break to seal a comfortable victory.<\/p>\n
Blues had not won at home since 20 September but produced a ruthless display from set-pieces against a fragile Pompey defence.<\/p>\n
The result moves Birmingham up to the top half of the table in 11th and leaves Portsmouth in 20th on 13 points.<\/p>\n
Blues boss Chris Davies stated in his pre-match press conference that his side were “not far away” from their best after a slight dry run in the league where they picked up just three points in six games, conceding 10 goals.<\/p>\n
The former Spurs assistant was proven right and more in arguably Birmingham’s best performance of the season, highlighting how they, like many clubs in the professional game, are prioritising set-plays.<\/p>\n
They really did flex their muscles in that area, as all four goals directly involved dead-balls, beginning with Paik’s opener.<\/p>\n
The South Korea international opened the scoring in the ninth minute with a brave diving header from a corner after a flurry of early chances, rewarding the Blues’ relentless start. <\/p>\n
Iwata doubled the lead 10 minutes after the break with a clever near-post flick – also from a corner – before club captain Klarer rose highest to nod in a third from Alex Cochrane’s free-kick delivery just after the hour mark. <\/p>\n
Anderson completed the rout on 88 minutes, winning a free-kick before receiving Iwata’s ball on the edge of the box and hitting a deflected strike into the roof of the net to cap a fine second-half cameo, much to the detriment of Pompey.<\/p>\n
The result extends Portsmouth’s winless run to four games as they sit four points above the relegation zone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Birmingham City emphatically bounced back to winning ways at St Andrew’s with a dominant Championship victory over Portsmouth.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-116432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}