Carlos Corberan pleased with West Brom 'specialist mentality' after Wigan win

Daryl Dike's first-half winner kept the Baggies on the coat-tails of their top six rivals by extending a phenomenal run of form at The Hawthorns.

It was not up there with some of their fine home victories under the Spanish head coach, but the hosts merited the three points that saw them up to ninth.

Corberan's men tired into the second period as the boss said fatigue can strike at this stage of the season and the lack of a second goal against the struggling Latics created some nerves, but he was pleased the Baggies dug in to claim the points.

“We want to win the games performing well, because the better we perform, the more chances we have to win the game," Corberan said.

“When you don’t perform well, you put the result at risk. I think we’ve moved to a point in the Championship now where you have to have a specialist mentality to meet the moments, otherwise fatigue will tell.

“We need to understand hat before Hull we were playing every four or five days then we had a full week before Hull and now we have a period of games in a row.

“In this period the number of possibilities for the squad have been reduced so the tiredness increases.

“In these type of situation, fatigue can start to play an important part, especially in the second halves of games, and this is something we need to avoid.

“Plus, at some point, there’s frustration where you have some chances but you don’t score, and this comes after a game (Hull) where we created a lot of chances and didn’t score.

“You can start to have doubts whether you can do it. I feel if we had scored a second goal, we would have been watching a different game."

Dike's sixth goal of the season made it nine wins from 10 at home in all competitions – eight in nine in the league – and is a much-needed tonic to five consecutive away defeats.

Corberan's side struck the woodwork on four occasions on a night they might have otherwise put a low-key contest to bed much sooner.

The head coach knows Wigan have been better of late under new boss Shaun Maloney that their position propping up the Championship table suggests. For the Scot that was just a second defeat in seven.

Another of the division's strugglers, Corberan's former employers Huddersfield now managed by the evergreen Neil Warnock, visit The Hawthorns on Saturday.

Corberan added: “The fact we didn’t score again increased the anxiety and negativity and we started to play worse. But at the same time, the players put in a lot of effort to receive this result.

“It was against a team that wasn’t easy to play against because they drew against Norwich, Blackpool and Birmingham and had only lost once in six games under a new coach.

“So I knew that sometimes the position of the team in the table doesn’t reflect the level of the squad. It happened to West Bromwich when I came here.

“So I knew the game wouldn’t be easy unless we scored the goals in the first half from the chances we created – then it would have been a different contest.

“It didn’t happen, so we had to manage the game with more difficulty than I would have liked to have."