Nigel Pearson: Bristol City boss urges more players to take scoring burden off strikers
- Published
Austrian Andreas Weimann is Bristol City's top scorer in the Championship with seven goals so far this season
Nigel Pearson wants more goalscorers in his Bristol City side to help lift the pressure on his two main strikers.
Andreas Weimann, with seven, and Chris Martin (five) lead City's scorers but only two other players, Alex Scott and Saikou Janneh, have scored two or more.
It puts the Robins in the bottom six teams in the Championship in terms of depth of scorers alongside Coventry, Hull, Peterborough, Barnsley and Derby.
"It's important that we share the goals amongst the squad," Pearson said.
"When Andi and Chris Martin are our top scorers and apart from that we get the odd one here or there, it's not what we're looking for. We need players all over the pitch to contribute.
"There's always areas of the game that we can improve at and certainly scoring goals throughout the side is going to help our cause."
Bristol City have endured an inconsistent run of results this season and sit 17th in the Championship, but go into their next match away to Pearson's former club Hull off the back of a 1-0 win over bottom-placed Derby.
While Weimann and Martin have contributed 12 of the Robins' 22 league goals this season, the duo are also responsible for the majority of the team's assists, with four each.
Nakhi Wells is the only other player to have created more than two assists so far that have resulted in goals.
"We've got to try and have more volume of attacking situations, too. You can't expect your strikers to survive on scraps and that's what we've been doing really," Pearson continued.
"It would be a lot easier to measure if we'd created a lot more chances, but we just haven't created a lot of chances in games. What you're then asking players to do is have a conversion rate of chances to goals which is top, top end and that's pressure on players; it's sometimes difficult to handle.
"In some games we've ended up winning and we've only created a few chances - we've done well to convert those chances."
Bristol City are also yet to record back-to-back victories in the league this season, something Pearson is keen to rectify at Hull City on Saturday.
"We've got to find a way of getting back to back wins, start to win away from home again," he said. "We've got to find those qualities from somewhere now."
Pearson confirmed the team will continue to be without defender Nathan Baker, who suffered his second concussion of the season and was stretchered off during the defeat by Sheffield United on 28 November. There is no timescale on when he might return.
"We need to make sure he does all the return-to-play protocols so it's likely he's going to be out for a while," he added.