In the wake of Rovers’ frustrating 2-2 home draw against Fleetwood Town, Rovers boss Tony Mowbray expressed his thoughts regarding the game to the clubs’ media team as he spoke about all the goals which included Joe Nuttall’s first league goal for the club.
“It’s a devastating dressing room to be honest; it feels like a defeat, we worked really hard to get our noses in-front against a really stodgy team, with a lot of men behind the ball and three dominating centre-halves at the back heading the ball out, it was difficult to penetrate, difficult to get behind them and create opportunities and yet we scored two goals, we should have been winning this game 2-0 and at the very worst 2-1. It’s a huge frustration; I’ve just tried to tell the players that whilst we’re disappointed with the goals we’ve conceded, we have to take the positives and remain positive and keep going, as there are a lot of games left and lots of three points to play for.
“I’ve watched both the goals we conceded again and they’re both really, really poor goals, which we haven’t been conceding lately. We talked about 7 clean sheets in 14 games; we’ve been pretty good defensively, we need to do better at set-pieces especially, but we have to accept it now. You have to give Fleetwood some credit for digging in and sticking at it, they’ve been that sort of team this year, who have scored a lot of late goals and we talked about how many goals they’ve scored after the 85th minute, which is shown by the two they scored at the weekend, one being in the 88th minute, the other being in the 93rd. They keep going until the end and we knew that, generally we’re pretty good at seeing games out, yet today we didn’t manage to do it.
“Joe (Nuttall) knows where the net is, you can look at his record for the u23s, but today was a test for him, playing against men, yet he was in the right position and the ball drops to him and he scores. It’s about having the knack to be in the right position, which is a fantastic knack for a centre-forward. I’m delighted for Joe, but the frustration of the result overrides any positives from the game. He’s not far away from being a regular in the first team, he’s got to keep working really hard, he’s got to listen, watch and learn, and has to try and grab any opportunity that comes his way, like he did tonight, but I think he’s got wonderful attributes, he’s mobile, he’s big and strong, he scores with both feet and he scores with his head.
“We have strikers at the club; I think Danny (Graham), who played tonight, worked really hard, we’ve got Bradley (Dack), Dominic (Samuel) who’s suspended and Marcus (Antonsson), so Joe has to be patient and wait for his opportunity and he did what was asked of him tonight, he went on and made a difference and we’ll see, as we move forward, how much game time he gets and how much he’ll impact the team.
“Joe did no more than he could do; he scored a goal, worked hard and got some flick-ons. He put himself at a fantastic position at the back post, he wasn’t trying to run past the near post, he just stood there and the ball came to him and he just stuck it into the net, he did what was asked of him.
“With the two cup competitions coming up (the FA Cup and the Checkatrade Trophy), along with the postponement of the Walsall game, this result is going to linger a bit, which is why it was important to get the three points and why it feels pretty hurtful. We’ll have dropped a few places in the table by the time we play in the league again, but we have to play all the games as they come, tonight was just an opportunity to get three points on the board with nobody else playing, we’ve ended up only putting one point on, but there are still lots of games still to play. We have to get back to clean sheets as quickly as we can, but we look forward to Saturday’s game in the FA Cup, in order to see if we can score a few goals, get a positive performance and see if we can get to the next round of the cup.”
