The left-back has seen sufficient quality in Alex McLeish's squad since his £1.5million move from Easter Road in January to believe Blues can survive ahead of Saturday's relegation scrap with Reading.

Murphy has quickly made his mark at St Andrews and a run of only one defeat in the last six games has helped City to keep above the bottom three.

And the 24-year-old is confident there will be better times to come under McLeish if Birmingham can successfully battle through their first season back amongst the elite.

Murphy said: "Winning the CIS Cup with Hibs last season was a massive highlight for me. To pick up your first trophy is always important and it was a great occasion.

"Maybe the 5-1 scoreline (against Kilmarnock) didn't reflect how the game went but it was a fantastic feeling although I don't remember that much about the game, just the celebrations afterwards!

"It was great to enjoy that success towards the end of three-and-a-half great years at the club who did so much for me after moving from Middlesbrough.

"But in a different sort of way staying up with Birmingham will mean as much. The Hibs cup win was massive for the club and staying up with Blues would also be a massive achievement.

"I haven't been in a relegation battle before. In Scotland I was always competing for Europe and we played in the Intertoto Cup. This is new to me but something I am relishing.

"I really believe if we stay up, we have got something here we could build on for next season. I can see things getting better if we survive. The management staff have got some great ideas. Hopefully they can realise them in the Premier League."

Murphy admitted: "We are in a dogfight but if I didn't think we were good enough for the Premier League, I wouldn't have come here a couple of months ago - and nothing has changed.

"There's enough quality in the squad. I've seen them day to day. There's a good spirit in the camp and we all believe we can get out of the situation we're in.

"I think we've been unlucky not to get more points in certain games. We've not taken our chances in certain games and maybe we've been punished for that. Had we done, maybe we would be a few more places up the table.

"We also haven't kept as many clean sheets as we would have liked. It's disappointing, especially from my point of view as a defender. We base our game on clean sheets and hopefully we can tighten up a little bit more at the back.

"We work a lot on the defending side in training and we seem a fairly solid back four, or back five including the goalkeeper. But errors have cost us."