As Rovers racked up their fifth defeat in their past half-a-dozen games, following their horrific 3-2 defeat away at Rotherham United, an irate Tony Mowbray managed to spare a few minutes of his time, to offer his perspective on the poor display he had just witnessed.
“I think ‘Groundhog Day’ is a good description for today’s game. I know I’m sick of the defensive mistakes and I know our supporters are sick of them, but I just hope that the players are as well. We have to stick together through this spell, because I can rant and shout, but we know what the problems are because they’re there right in-front of our eyes. We seem to be conceding 3 goals every game now.
“Is it tactical? I don’t think so. It’s not about whether we play 4 at the back or 5 in midfield, it’s about what’s in your stomach and the defensive capabilities of the squad. If you look at the first goal today, it’s a simple throw-in which leads to an even simpler header into the bottom corner, and it was almost identical to the third goal, only that came from a cross.
“You have to defend. You have to head the ball. You have to use your body, be a man and deal with the situation. I think at the moment we’re lacking a little bit of that. The job is to find some players who want to defend and want to put their bodies on the line, even though they might not be as technically gifted as the players we’ve got at the moment, but that’s the balance that we’re going to have to find.
“I don’t want to be too harsh on the players because they’ve been amazing all season and up until the end of January, we were on the cusp of the playoffs, we were flying and the team were doing well, so I’m not going to give up on them, because they’re a great set of lads, but what I do have to do, for the supporters of this football club and for the club itself, is to make it known that, if they can’t do it (defend properly), we have to replace them and move forward. I’m in no doubt that the supporters of the club would expect that to happen and as the manager, that’s what will happen if they’re not up for it, but we can’t do that until the summer, and we’ll have to replace them with players who want to help us win games.
“Had we got a clean sheet today, we would have walked away from here with a 2-0 victory, and some praise for the players. You can’t keep losing 3 goals a game, because you’ll never get any points, so as we’ve got 11 games to go, we need to find ways to win some of those matches, in order to avoid the potentiality of looking over our shoulders at the relegation zone. We start that run with a couple of home games now, but they’re derby games where I expect the players to roll their sleeves up and get some results over the next week in order to calm things down, but with that, the bigger problem of defensive frailty, which needs addressing in the summer, won’t be solved.
“I don’t think there’s an onus on the players to change who they are, so to speak, because it’s not something we talk about on a regular basis. They knew coming into this game, what Rotherham possessed. They utilise long throw-ins, corners and free-kicks well and it’s like an event for them because it allows their crowd to get up and make some noise. They send their centre-halves in which, coupled with the rest of their big players, creates a lot of problems in the opposition penalty area, but what disappoints me the most, is that we did the work beforehand and knew what was coming from them. We worked non-stop on defending their aerial threat and their set-pieces and yet within 2 minutes of the game, their first throw-in leads to the ball ending up in the back of our net. It’s not a question of the players not being aware of the opposition’s threat, they just didn’t concentrate today because they knew what was coming prior to kick-off and ultimately, they couldn’t and didn’t deal with the situations Rotherham put them in.
“We haven’t had a problem recently, with scoring goals away from home, but it’s a difficult conversation for me to have, because I don’t want to be too personal with my criticisms, on camera, about certain players, but we have to improve as a unit. The defensive side of our group and the whole team have to work hard in order to stop the ball going into our net. I find it unacceptable, which is easy to say, to come to Rotherham and lose 3 goals, especially due to the nature of them. It wasn’t as if they carved us open and we were camped on the edge of our own box, they basically lofted the ball into the box and headed it in, as simple as that. We have to be better. We have to be more dominant and if the players we’ve got can’t do it, then we have to find some that will.
“This poor run is clearing a few things up for me in my mind in regard to the way we have to go about our business in the future. We’ve always said that, we’d give the team who got us out of League 1, the opportunity to make their mark on the Championship and to try and establish themselves as Championship players and try and help our club move toward the Premier League in the next year or so, but, in reality, you don’t get anywhere near the Premier League if you’re shipping 3 goals every game! The players know that, and they’ve been told that. I’m stuck between liking the players, because they’re great characters and great individuals who work really hard and yet if they can’t do the job we have to potentially move forward without them.”
