With his 57th minute howitzer being enough to see off Derby County and give Rovers their second consecutive 1-0 home victory, Blues forward Adam Armstrong reacted to the game, and his fourth goal of the season, with the club’s media team.
“It was a nice goal and one worthy of winning any game. I felt I had some good chances throughout the game, and so did the other lads, but it’s nice to see one of them hit the back of the net and earn us the three points. I struck it well after my first touch set me up nicely in order to strike it. It’s all about luck at times, sometimes those strikes come off, sometimes they don’t, but luckily it flew into the back of the net! With it being the matchwinner it becomes an even sweeter goal, but I thought we deserved the victory throughout the game. We were brilliant today, we passed the ball out from the back and created a lot of chances. If we weren’t creating those chances, then we’d have a problem, but we’re on a good run and we’re creating a lot of chances throughout each game, so let’s hope we can keep it up.
“We couldn’t find that second goal to kill the game off, but that’s football. When you’re under that amount of pressure towards the end of the game, you’ve got to know how and when to see it out and that’s something we probably need to work on. Hopefully, when we get put under that amount of pressure again when holding a lead, we’ll be a bit better in order to stop the opposition getting a shot away.
“We’ve no doubt improved at seeing games out this season, as today and the victory over Brentford show, but we do still need to work on it and keep improving. With games being as tight as they are, we would have probably conceded today and against Brentford, in the final few minutes and dropped points, but this season, I think the defence and Christian (Walton) have been brilliant in the final periods of games, especially today. Christian has kept us in a few games over the last couple of weeks, so hopefully he can keep that up and we can do our business up at the other end.
“The confidence within the group is brilliant and high up there after these four wins on the bounce. We knew before the game that we had to keep getting wins, but four in a row is massive and we should try to make it five on Wednesday (away at Swansea City). I’m not sure what the secret behind the run is, it just started with Barnsley being a ‘must-win’ game and getting through that with a positive result gave us the confidence to push on and the gaffer’s still confident as are we, that we can win a lot of games in this division. We’ve been brilliant this past week, but it’s still early days, we need to keep on working hard and pushing ourselves to improve.
“We’ve got to keep the wins coming in order to make it a habit. We get our confidence as a squad through earning three points each game and if we can keep doing that then I’m sure we’ll be fine come the end of the season. Although we found a ruthless streak in League One, we can’t keep looking back on that season too much, we’ve got to move forward and concentrate on what’s ahead of us. We have to keep the three points coming from each game which will keep us as players and the fans happy.
“Although, as I said before, it’s still early days in the league, it’s nice to look at the table and see that we’re up and around the playoffs. We can’t stand still now though, we have to keep working hard in training and on matchdays in order to keep the three points coming which will help us get to where we want to be come the end of the season. If we stay within touching distance after coming out of this tough festive period, we’ll have something to build off. The games will be coming thick and fast over the Christmas period, so if we manage to get through them, I’m sure we’ll see it out. In the Championship, you’re playing quality every week and that’s evident in the back-to-back away games at Swansea City and Bristol City that we’ve got coming up. There isn’t a bad team in this league, so we just need to keep going, keep working and recover well in order to be at our maximum each game.”
