Following Rovers’ last-gasp draw against leaders Shrewsbury, in which Bradley Dack equalised for Rovers with 6 minutes to go, Rovers boss Tony Mowbray spoke with BBC Radio Lancashire as he discussed his thoughts following the dramatic game.
“I think it was our poorest performance of the season. I’ve just told them that it was an unacceptable performance from my view. They didn’t carry out what we had worked on and they played their own game for long spells and we suffered as a result. We have to accept a point from the game and move on but we have to perform a lot better than that in the future.
“I think it is two points dropped today rather than two points gained, however in the balance of play, it’s a point gained, of course because they were decent opponents, regardless, I do expect Blackburn Rovers to be a lot better than Shrewsbury Town and we didn’t show that today. We struggled for long spells of the game, but next game will have its own identity, against a different team, we’ll play a different way and we’ll see how we get on.
“The players deserve some credit for the equaliser, but it doesn’t really matter to me, ultimately your performance levels over 46 games is what’s going get you promoted, relegated or sitting in mid-table and if that’s the performance levels we’ll be having throughout, then we’ll be nowhere near the top of the league. All I’m saying is that we need to find a better performance level, week in, week out and that was our worst performance so far and yet we’ve come away with a point against the team that’s top of the division.
“The goal we conceded was just a load of players going for the ball. Sometimes you’d hope that the whistle would blow for a foul on the goalkeeper, which it didn’t so you have to take it on the chin and move on. I would have hoped that our goalie would have punched it away, but he said that he ended up punching the back of someone’s head and the ball fell down to the feet of the goal-scorer. It’s a disappointing goal, yet I’ve said before, I think that the officials at this level find it really difficult watching the game, they see a different game from myself at times throughout the 90 minutes but I don’t think that’s me putting any pressure or criticising, I just like officials to make better decisions. We were disappointed, we expected to come here and win, which we didn’t, we’ll put the point in the bag and move onto Tuesday.”
The manager was also questioned about how the team passed the ball and whether he was concerned regarding the sloppy passing that the players were at times executing in dangerous areas of the field.
“No, I’m not concerned. It happened once or twice but I was more concerned about how we booted the ball up the pitch to be honest, which is not how I want to play, it looked like we were stuck between two ways of playing. We’ve had some success on the road by being pretty solid, playing off the strikers, keeping the shape behind the ball, breaking away on the counter and scoring a goal and I thought the service forward today was pretty poor. I don’t think we gave the strikers much service to work off and I thought their competitive edge in midfield gave us problems; their athleticism in midfield gave us some problems. We have things to work on and hopefully it will jar a few ready for Tuesday night.
“The key for Bradley (Dack) is his fitness and whether he can play consecutive 90 minutes because the worst case scenario for us is him playing for 90 minutes and then pulling his hamstring after an hour in the next game. It was a difficult game for him, I asked him to play in a position that was probably a bit foreign to him and he played on the side where their right winger caused us a lot of problems, which I why I swapped him over, to replace Bennett, on the other side of the pitch, it didn’t effect much, but I’m pleased for Bradley that he’s scored, he’s probably been our best technical finisher in training with both feet and we need to get him in positions in and around the box so he can show people that he can do, what we all in training know, he can do.”
