Bristol City’s Daniel Bentley has told Bristol Live that he wants to the club to pick up more clean sheets this season.
The Robins are coming off the back of a season where they had a chance of making the play-offs. However, when that looked likely, a poor run of form saw them drop away from the top six. This form also saw the end of Lee Johnson’s time at Ashton Gate with him being sacked during this run of form.
On the flip side under new boss Dean Holden, Bristol City have got off to a good start this season. They won both of their Carabao Cup ties to get to the Third Round of that tournament and also won their Sky Bet Championship opener against Coventry City 2-1.
One of the targets their goalkeeper Bentley has is to get more clean sheets. He believes they were very sloppy at times last season and he wants them to defend as a team to make sure they concede less goals this time.
Bentley said: “We want to improve on everything – there’s nothing where everyone thinks we’ve cracked it and we don’t need to improve.
“However [the goals conceded last season] was something we touched on as a collective at the end of last season and is something that we’ve spoken on as a group coming in to this season.
“There is a number of clean sheets that we want. And it’s considerably higher than last year – albeit 10 was a fairly good number if you look at the number of goals we conceded and how sloppy the manner was for the goals we gave away.
“However we’re focusing more on a team collective effort of defending. Whether that’s Nahki [Wells] losing the ball in their box and he has to run back 70 yards to make a last ditch tackle, then so be it.
“As a team we defend and attack collectively.
And everything else inbetween is a collective. It’s not just down to the goalkeeper and defenders to keep clean sheets, but equally it’s not down to the strikers and the wingers to score goals. It’s everybody – with Tomas against Coventry: that’s our centre-back trying to keep a clean sheet all game winning us the game.
“As a collective we have certain aims we want to achieve that I’ll keep in-house now on how we want to improve on the manner of goals we give away.”
