Chris Brunt proud to be fighting for top 10 place

The long-serving Northern Irishman reckons going a whole season without ever being worried about the drop is a ‘big achievement’ for the Baggies.

And he defended the team’s performances since reaching 40 points, dismissing the critics who claim Tony Pulis’s side have been ‘on the beach’.

“That’s a natural reaction for people to say that,” he said. “It’s easy for them to say it from the outside when they’re not seeing what we’re doing day in, day out, the effort we’re putting into games.

“It’s a big achievement for a club our size to be as comfortable as we have been.

“We’ve done well in the middle part of the season, we didn’t start too well and we haven’t done too well recently.

“But I think you finish where you deserve to over the 38 games and we’ve got three games left to make sure we finish in the top ten.

“At the start of the season you’d have snapped somebody’s hand off for that.”

Pulis believes Albion had better chances in previous games than they did at Turf Moor and Brunt echoed his gaffer’s thoughts, saying they did nothing differently against Burnley, who they scored two goals against, than they had done in the previous five outings when they had failed to score.

“I don’t think we’ve been on the beach,” he said. “The last couple of games we’ve played alright.

“Against Leicester and Liverpool we haven’t really done anything different than what we did on Saturday.

“Obviously when we got the chances we took them and we were a bit more dangerous off set plays than we have been in the last few weeks.

“It was good, it’s a tough place to come, Burnley do what they do really well.

“It’s disappointing we didn’t hold on but if you look back at it over the weekend we’d probably have taken a point.”

Scoring against Burnley has restored some confidence in the team going into Friday night’s clash with Chelsea at The Hawthorns. Antonio Conte’s team can wrap up the Premier League title if they win, but Brunt says the Baggies are determined to spoil the party.

“Especially in our last home game (we don’t want it to happen),” he said. “We’ve done reasonably well at home this season so it’d be nice to go and get a result if we can. It’s up to us, we can’t just roll over.”