Following Rovers’ second home loss of the season which came against another newly-promoted side, with Luton Town emerging 2-1 winners on a wet and windy Saturday afternoon at Ewood Park, an irritated Tony Mowbray criticised his side’s lack of potency, whilst speaking to the club’s media team.
“Today’s result has left us with a hugely frustrated, disappointed and quiet dressing room. Today was a real opportunity for us to make a statement to the league against a newly-promoted side, that we’ve just wasted and yet it feels bigger than just a wasted opportunity, it feels like a huge blow to lose against a team, with all due respect to them, have just come out of League One, and if we have aspirations to threaten the top end of this league, then we have to beat the likes of Luton Town, with all due respect to them. Ultimately, we had enough territorially and enough possession to make things count and yet we must improve in order to break down teams who come to make life hard for us, but on the other hand, you cannot let them score soft goals like we let them do today.
“Today was a very similar game to the one against Charlton Athletic on the opening day where, a combination of a lack of attacking threat and inability to stop soft goals has led to a defeat. I think the frustrating thing for me is that, even though we’re a couple of months on from that Charlton game, the problems that arose from that loss still existed in today’s defeat. Although we have been scoring goals and winning matches in recent weeks, today’s game was really frustrating and hard to put into words because I thought that today was a great opportunity to put on a good performance and win well, in order to carry on our momentum and appetite into Tuesday’s game against Nottingham Forest in the hope of moving up the table and yet it wasn’t to be. We have to get back to the drawing board and keep going.
“Are we trying to score the perfect goal in some respects? Maybe we are, and yet I said to the lads in the dressing room that in the last 20 minutes, top top teams, who play against an opponent who are sat deep and are hanging on for dear life, create more opportunities, get in behind their defence more and fizz a higher number of balls across their box in the hope someone can find an equaliser, or a winner, but there wasn’t enough of that today and we didn’t really ask enough questions of them, despite having the ball pinned in and around their box for most of that 20 minute period. We frustratingly lacked the guile to salvage something today. Maybe we needed the individuality of a Joe Rothwell, who’s still ill, in order to give us some speed and the technical awareness to get beyond their defensive block by playing a one-two with a teammate and yet we didn’t have that capability today, with total respect to Adam (Armstrong) and Sam (Gallagher), they’re different types of players who possess speed and power, but lack the necessary craft that you need when playing against a deep block like Luton’s.
“We now have to put this behind us and move on. Whilst you’re allowed to be disappointed and frustrated, we have an opportunity against Forest on Tuesday at Ewood to put things right and get three points. Whilst the three points today would have been massive, had we salvaged a point today and got a draw against Forest on Tuesday, we’d have earned two points, whereas if we beat Forest, we’ll have three, so that’s what we need to focus on and prepare for.
“As I said, it was almost identical to the opening day, especially with the failure to clear the set-piece which resulted in a goal. We’ve been pretty good with getting first contact on set-pieces and balls into the box in recent weeks and yet we’re left hugely frustrated. I generally didn’t feel they opened us up at all today and created many chances, but the nature of the winning goal to have been so easy from a set-piece, was frustrating. Do we work on set-pieces? Yes, we do. We work tirelessly on trying to make first contact with set-pieces in training, it’s almost a mantra really and yet, for their boy to climb and nod the ball home with such ease left us with a mountain to climb which we failed to climb, unfortunately.
“You’d have to say that today’s performance was a decent, dominant performance with the ball, we’re just not scoring the goals and killing opponents off, who are coming here and sitting a lot of men behind the ball and maybe they’re not days for the ‘speed’ players like Armstrong and Gallagher, but more an opportunity for the more creative players, which is something I’ll look at and decide upon, depending on the opponent and the circumstances of team selection and how I think we’re going to end up playing, whether we’re going to be forced into playing it around the opponents box, or whether we can get in-behind them with pace. Overall there is a frustration because in both games, against Charlton and Luton, we’ve had a lot of the ball, lots of blocked efforts and we were at times playing a bit too direct. I felt we needed to get an extra pass in, in order to get in-behind Luton and put it across the six-yard box in order to force them into defending, but there wasn’t enough of that today, and will be something we look at in training in the hope of getting it right as we move forward, and hopefully we’ll have a lot of games at home this season where we’re breaking teams down and scoring goals, but obviously, we need to stop the opposition scoring soft goals at the other end.
“I try not to get too involved with the officials straight after the game. I don’t go and scan the video straight after full-time and then go scream at the referee, because the result is the result and I can’t change that. Although I haven’t watched it back as of this interview, if they managed to get the right decision between them in terms of disallowing it, then it’s an irrelevant part of the game because the scoreline shows we had a 2-1 defeat. I think the referee had a tough game today because it seemed as if Luton were taking their time over everything, really. The fact that it felt as if they needed a full minute to take a goal-kick or a throw-in irritated the crowd and it irritated me, but although it seems like ‘sour grapes’, I don’t want it to come across that way because Luton did a job that they’ll be delighted with, so congratulations to them. I’m more frustrated with how we played, more than how the officials performed, to be honest. We should have been better, we should have created more clear goal-scoring opportunities, even though they did have a lot of men back, but that’s ultimately the job they set out to do, nobody’s here to make football easy for us, we got off to a fantastic start during the opening 10-15 minutes and were pinned around their box during the last 20 minutes and yet we failed to capitalise on both period of dominance, which is frustrating.”
