Birmingham City 3 - 0 Coventry City

[dutchman]

Birmingham beat Coventry to maintain survival hopes



Birmingham City beat neighbours Coventry City to keep their Championship survival hopes alive and dent Coventry's play-off ambitions.

An own-goal from Coventry's Bobby Thomas unsettled the visitors, before Ivan Sunjic fired in and Jay Stansfield finished neatly from close range.

Birmingham are one point above the drop zone with three games to go.

Coventry are now eight points off the play-off places with the same number of league matches remaining.

The visitors looked the more confident side in possession early on, with Milan van Ewijk firing a low shot narrowly wide.

Birmingham responded with neat build-up play that found winger Koji Miyoshi at the back post, but his strike could only find the side netting.

Moments later, Anderson crept his way into the Sky Blues penalty area and his drive ricocheted off defender Thomas and into the goal.

Coventry continued to work hard in the hope that their quality would shine through. Haji Wright produced a delicate lob to beat John Ruddy, only for his shot to cannon off the crossbar.

But minutes before half-time, the Sky Blues failed to clear properly from a corner and Sunjic was waiting in space to strike the ball beautifully past goalkeeper Bradley Collins.

Birmingham started the second half where they left off the first as Stansfield collected the ball smartly inside the penalty area and fired it through the legs of Collins.

When the full-time whistle sounded at St Andrew's, Birmingham remained one point inside the relegation zone, but Bristol City's late equalising goal at Huddersfield meant Blues moved above the Terriers and into 21st place in the table.

Coventry City manager Mark Robins told BBC CWR:

"I could have taken everyone off at half time. There was just nothing. It was a non-performance.

"We were second best to everything. When you are fighting for your lives at the bottom of the division, you know that this is going to be a tough game.

"When you have got a situation that we are in, where we are trying to get into the play-offs, you expect a response and we didn't have enough of a response.

"The energy, the way that we think, the way that we were making mistakes from a tactical point of view - where we start to move into spaces - is just foreign to me."