Ahead of Blackburn Rovers’ Carabao Cup 1st round tie away at the Ricoh Arena to face recently relegated Coventry City, Rovers chief Tony Mowbray sat down with the club to discuss his thoughts on how he viewed his return back to the club he managed at less than 18 months ago.
“Coventry will see us as a big scalp and we have to be ready for that. One positive is that it is a much more open arena, a bigger pitch, bigger environment for us to go and play in and hopefully our quality footballers will be able to find the space and play how we know we can.
“We have to go and try to impose ourselves on them and try and use our quality. Yet we have to be very mindful that they’ll be very organised and very hard to break down. Not too dis-similar from Southend.
“It’ll be a good game, a tough test for sure, as they’ve got very good players, but one we won’t be taking it lightly. We’ll go there, be organised and hopefully put in a performance that gives us the result we want.”
The former Coventry man also talked about his team selection for the game discussing the injuries picked up by Bradley Dack & Darragh Lenihan which forced Rovers to effectively play with 10 men for the final 10 minutes against Southend.
“The players who will start the game are those who have generally played throughout the preseason, don’t expect wholesale changes, don’t expect half of the under 23s playing, we have to go there and try and be positive and try and get a victory to try and get our season kicked off. It’ll be nice to go into the home game against Doncaster (on the 12th August) off the back of a victory in midweek. We know that Coventry have had a good result at the weekend and they’ll be looking forward to the challenge of Rovers coming to town.
“The news on Darragh and Bradley is generally positive. Bradley came off pretty soon after he felt his hamstring, so hopefully there’s no severe damage done there, so hopefully it’s not weeks and weeks. Darragh has had an x-ray and there’s nothing showing on the x-ray at all and he’s been for a scan today and once we get the results, we’ll have a clearer picture of how long he’ll be out for, but we’re quite hopeful that, after looking at the x-ray there’s nothing serious. Ben Gladwin also trained today as did Craig Conway, so we’ll make those assessments and see how they react in the morning then make a decision on whether they can come with us. I think they’re two important players who bring a good work ethic and attacking intentions.”
