West Brom caretaker boss Jimmy Shan hailed the display of matchwinner Kyle Edwards as the Baggies strengthened their grip on a Championship play-off place with a 1-0 win at Brentford.
In only his third start for Albion, 21-year-old Edwards netted his second goal – and first in the Championship – to give Shan back-to-back wins since replacing the sacked Darren Moore.
Shan was delighted to see Edwards, one of his rising stars in the youth set-up, strike the winner.
“I have a lot of faith and trust in Kyle and have watched performances like that at every age group,” said Shan.
“He’s a talented boy – his goal was a special moment for him and it was a special, special goal.
“You always think they have the potential to do that but until they set foot on the pitch at this level you don’t know.”
Shan dedicated the win to club secretary Simon Carrington, a popular figure within around The Hawthorns, who died in midweek following a battle with cancer.
“He was looking down on us today so that performance and victory was for him,” said Shan.
“He was a fantastic human being and very popular around the training ground, so it’s been a very sad couple of days.
“That’s two wins in four games and no goals conceded so I’m very pleased with that. If you have the bedrock of clean sheets you always give yourself a chance against a very good footballing team like Brentford.”
Shan insists he has no idea of any time frame regarding a new manager, but added: “I have done what I was asked to do.
“The board are speaking to two or three people and I know I’ll go back to being the first-team coach.
“My main thought today is with Simon. Football has to move on quickly, sometimes a little too quickly, but the focus of the game on Wednesday and today meant it was business as usual in many respects due to the industry.”
Frustrated Brentford head coach Thomas Frank took a thinly veiled swipe at West Brom’s tactics as they clung on to a precious three points at Griffin Park.
Albion’s game management, and the reluctance of referee Andrew Madley to stop it, incensed the home crowd and ended the Bees’ seven-game home winning run.
Dwight Gayle was the focus of much of the anger for a couple of blatant dives, but the visitors’ timewasting went unpunished as Madley added just four minutes to the clock.
Frank said: “Every football club decides what kind of football they want to play and that is up to them. There are many ways to go to the top and the way they played today showed they have a lot of respect for us.
“We would prefer to do what we do better. We need to handle situations better and make the fine margins in games like this count. We need to be able to handle teams that want to delay and slow the game down better.”
But he added: “It is part of the game and it happens every week but we need to look behind the result. First half we dominated and created opportunities but we should have got more out of them and the strong wind.
“We then made it difficult for ourselves and maybe didn’t take the good counter-attacking opportunities we had at the other end when they came. They are the margins that decide games.”
