Where Bristol Rovers can hurt Birmingham City this weekend as Gas travel to promotion favourites

On paper, Birmingham City away was always going to be the most difficult fixture in the calendar for any side and, ahead of Bristol Rovers' visit to St. Andrew's @ Knighthead Park this weekend, it remains the most colossal game in League One.

What would have been a tough task even if the Gas were in good form now looks even more daunting two days out on the back of two of Rovers' poorest performances of the campaign in the league against Blackpool and Leyton Orient.

Matt Taylor's side failed to register a shot on target in either match and have struggled for goals for weeks now with just two in their last six outings across all competitions.

Meanwhile, after a blip in November where they drew at home to Northampton Town and lost at bottom side Shrewsbury Town, Birmingham are once again on the up with five consecutive victories across all competitions and are very much back on track to win the league title and possibly even lift some silverware at Wembley in the EFL Trophy.

Anything other than a convincing Blues victory would be a surprise as things stand but there is recent evidence of sides knocking around the bottom end of the league table getting results against this Birmingham team.

With all that considered, Bristol Live spoke to Birmingham City reporter Alex Dicken at our sister title Birmingham Live for insight on all things Blues going into this weekend...

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What have you made of Birmingham City's season so far and League One as a division?

To be honest, I've been pleasantly surprised by League One and the quality and tactical set ups of the teams. I think there are a lot of well set up teams in League One, probably more than I thought there would be. Every Blues fan expected them to batter a team at some stage and that hasn't happened yet. They still haven't won a league game by more than a two-goal margin.

Blues have been pretty good. They had a little blip after losing to Charlton where I think they only won two of six and went three games without a win with a couple draws and a defeat to Shrewsbury but that loss seems to have been the kick up the backside they needed because they've won five games on the spin since and have looked very good.

They've not played especially well in the last two against Barnsley and Exeter City in the EFL Trophy; they made quite a lot of changes for Exeter on Tuesday night.

It's been good without being completely electrifying at this stage. The thing is with Blues, they've got such depth that they're just going to be winning, winning, winning whereas other teams around them will slip up because of the sheer number of games League One teams are playing at this time of year. I expect them to build up a gap eventually.

Who have been the real stand out players?

There have obviously been a fair few. You look at the names of Jay Stansfield and Alfie May who are scoring the goals. Neither has been completely consistent this season. There have been teething issues with that partnership.

Tomoki Iwata and Seung-ho Paik in midfield have been absolutely outstanding. Paik, for me, is Blues' most talented player and Chris Davies recently said he sees no reason why it can't be a Premier League midfield pairing. He thinks they've got the quality to do that and obviously he's spent most of his coaching career at Premier League clubs so he can probably spot a Premier League player.

Iwata has been a bit of a surprise because he arrived at Blues without any kind of goalscoring history and he's scored six goals already and they've all been excellent finishes usually from the edge or just inside of the box.

Willum Willumsson is a really good player as we kind of expected because he's a full Iceland international and had been doing very well in the Eredivisie and it was a bit of a shock that Blues were able to get him. Christoph Klarer at centre-back has also been pretty good and solid as well as Ben Davies alongside him. When Davies has played, Blues have only conceded six goals.

Bristol Rovers fans will try and take some confidence from the fact that Northampton got a draw at Birmingham and Shrewsbury beat them. What went wrong on those afternoons?

They were very different games. Northampton were incredibly lucky and Blues missed a lot of chances before basically giving Northampton a goal right at the end with two errors. I wasn't massively impressed by them.

Blues had battered Shrewsbury 4-0 in the EFL Trophy six weeks before with a weakened team and they had their first 11 out and just played really badly. That was by far their worst performance of the season and Shrewsbury, with a new manager and full crowd on the day, just seemed really up for it and caused them a few issues.

What I would say about Blues is that they can be susceptible down their right side. That does seem to be where the problems have come in games this season. So a lot of the time they'll set up in a 4-2-3-1 but when they're in possession it becomes a back three. Shrewsbury caused them quite a lot of problems down that side.

What has been the verdict on Chris Davies and his style of play so far?

I'd probably stick him around an eight because he's obviously got the best tools in League One so we're expecting Blues to win the league and I think anything other than that and maybe winning the EFL Trophy will leave a little bit of a sour taste I suppose because it wouldn't be perfect. But I suppose Ipswich weren't perfect and went to the Championship and then the Premier League and if Chris Davies could do that then he'd be a legend in these parts.

He's done very well, I think. To change the playing style more than anything else because Blues have had a lot of issues trying to transition from more of a counter-attack style to being a pressing and possession-based football team and he's come in in the summer and signed 17 new players and managed to do it very quickly. Admittedly, it's a level below from when his predecessors tried to do that but he's done very well and Blues do play some lovely football at times.

I don't think we can be anything other than impressed really. The test for Davies will be over these next three months where he's got to rotate his team an awful lot and still try and maintain results and keep Blues fighting on at least two fronts as well as progressing in the FA Cup if they can.

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