With Rovers stopping their run of 4 defeats being extended 5, following a 2-2 draw away at St. Andrew’s against Birmingham City, Blues boss Tony Mowbray – who on Friday celebrated 2 years at the helm of the Ewood Park club – disclosed his thoughts on the score draw, to the club’s media team.
“I feel that we could have won today because I think we got on top of the game after the first 20 minutes, which was poor start from our perspective. After that, we were on the front-foot and played with aggression whilst our transitional play was threatening with the likes of (Lewis) Travis, (Elliott) Bennett and (Harrison) Reed all breaking through their (defensive) lines. We felt at the break, as if the game was there for us if we pushed a little bit harder. I can only put the poor performance of the first 20 minutes down to being fearful of the recent results we’ve had. We put a load of men behind the ball with no showing of aggression or making contact with the opposition, all the while thinking that putting men behind the ball would be the best way to stop the opposition. We rectified that tactical situation at half-time and ultimately, we’re frustrated that we didn’t win.
“The frustration in the dressing room at full-time, is more anger than frustration. You can’t go 2-1 up, with a couple of minutes to go and not win the game, especially after the season we’ve had so far. The game away at Elland Road against Leeds United jumps into my mind straight away, because we have to win those types games and not let the points slip late on. How many lessons do you have to learn as we go forwards, before the penny drops? And yet, their second goal today, was such a poor one to concede. That’s my emotion of it. We should have won 2-1, and we could have won 3-2 at the death, but they kept driving and kept pushing. Let’s put the 4 defeats that we’ve had behind us and move onto Rotherham United next week and win to show how good of a team we are.
“It’s amazing how quickly your confidence, as a footballer, can be eroded, even though we’ve been playing well of late, despite not getting the results. I’ve told the lads, their performance against Bristol City was okay whilst the performance against Reading was good. The people who went to those games might not agree, but I think they were, from my perspective as the manager, because I thought the team, in those games, played to a high level and yet we got nothing from those games. The first-half against Middlesbrough was shocking, whilst the second-half saw a huge improvement and although we seemingly got hammered at Brentford, who are a pretty good team at home, we were more than enough value for a victory until the last 20 minutes. Overall, there shouldn’t have been a lack of confidence coming into this game, and although I keep telling them that they’ve been doing okay, I think the belief flowed back into them during the second-half today and we could have ended up with all 3 points.
“Charlie (Mulgrew) has got magnificent technique to be able to score directly from corners. As I’ve mentioned previously, although I shouldn’t really, we’ve had him practice scoring them directly and yet, if the delivery’s like that, they’re unstoppable as long as people are doing their jobs by getting across the goalkeeper and their first man. Charlie is part of a defence that are conceding too many goals and I think we have the worst away defensive record in the league which we need to improve upon, so we can’t sit here and laud Charlie too much because his primary objective is to keep the ball out of our net, rather than put it in our opponents’. At the end of the day, clean sheets are what drive teams out of this division and we need to find a way to keep them. We’re without (Darragh) Lenihan at the moment, who is a miss. Whoever Lenihan plays alongside at the back, isn’t down to me, but is down to the performance levels of the individuals within our defensive unit.
“I’ve watched Bradley’s (Dack) chance at the death back, and he’s covered an amazing amount of ground to be able to make contact with Adam’s (Armstrong) cross. It was one of those chances where, if it had slightly less pace on, it would have been an easy tap-in for the lad, but he’s had to hook his left-foot around it in order to poke it into the net and he didn’t quite get enough on it. Our bench thought we’d scored because half of them were up running past me onto the pitch! It’s frustrating that we didn’t win, not only through that chance, but at 2-1, because we should have left here with all 3 points. We’ll take the single point over a defeat, because it gets our tally on the table moving again. We need to move to next week against Rotherham United, before a double header of home derbies against Preston North End and Wigan Athletic, which, although won’t be easy, we should be relishing.
“You could potentially say that the final 10 minutes from today, sum up our season as a whole, but I’m trying to be positive and not be too disappointed with the lads. You need to remember that we’ve just come out of League 1 and we near enough have the exact same squad we did last year. These players have really put an outstanding shift in, over the past 18 months and I think they’re running at their maximum, yet, we have to keep going for another dozen games. We’ll keep working at the same intensity in order to see where we end up come the end of the season. We should all, and that includes the fans, not be disappointed if we don’t make it (the playoffs) this year, because we will strengthen over the summer whilst keeping the same work ethic, the same beliefs and we’ll be better because we’ll have better players in some key positions, which is what the fans should look forward to. This season, from the perspective of the supporters, is about just supporting the team in what they’re doing and whoever came today will have hopefully seen the huge effort we put in after the first 20 minutes. Moving forwards, however, I can guarantee that we’ll be playing on the front-foot in order to try and beat every team we play.
“I do hope the fans acknowledged the efforts of the players today. They pay a lot of money to follow their team, whilst spending days away from their families and I think they just want to see their team give everything they’ve got, regardless of the result and hopefully, for over an hour in this game, I think that’s what they got.”
