After Rovers started 2020 with a narrow 3-2 defeat against Nottingham Forest away at the City Ground, boss Tony Mowbray spoke in an optimistic manner, despite his side’s defeat, as he highlighted that he did see some positives within Rovers’ display, one of which being the fact that the Blues ended the game with 67% possession from 572 passes.
“I’ve just been telling the team that they can’t expect to beat anyone defending the way we did today. I wouldn’t even expect to see that kind of defending on a Sunday morning, let alone in the Championship. It’s uncharacteristic from the team because we’ve been fairly solid defensively for a long period of time, as I’ve highlighted many times, but as we’ve seen for a few years scoring two goals here is usually enough to come away from here, with all three points and yet that wasn’t the case today, due to our uncharacteristically poor defending.
“There were a lot of positives from today, however as I’ve said to the team, that doesn’t count for anything if we can’t keep the ball out of our net. They can’t allow (Joe) Lolley to come inside on his left-foot for the first goal, Christian (Walton) made a really poor decision for the penalty and Tosin (Adarabioyo) was nowhere near (Lewis) Grabban for their third goal, and he was the only opposition player in the box! It’s a frustrating day for us because we’ve produced some positive stuff, but ultimately, we have to win games and once again we haven’t done that today.
“We can stand here and say ‘we should have done this or that’ but it’s irrelevant as the game is over. There was a lot of good stuff on show today, but when you combine everything, we’ve ended up not being good enough for all three points today, and yet as I said before the game we should be coming here and winning, in my opinion, as we’. We should also be going to Huddersfield Town and winning, but we lost there on Sunday. We are stretched at the moment and I genuinely believe that it’s stemmed from the Wigan Athletic game that got put back two extra days because of the TV. I’ve been watching the team over the past few days and they look drained. We’re trying to train, hold meetings, show them analytical footage, travel and then ask them to play 95 minutes and it’s all looking a bit too much for them. And on top of all that we’ve got the injuries that we’ve got, which don’t help us. We’ve had one or two who have had the flu or heavy colds and yet they’ve been out there playing because they were playing as cover due to the injuries. It sounds like I’m making excuses, but that’s the reality of the situation. We are stretched at the moment. We have to dig in, stick together and keep going.
“This period of the season can tire you out both physically and mentally and a couple of the lads are feeling that. I think with the amount of energy they expend, it forces their immune systems to get weaker which causes them to be ‘under the weather’ because there’s a higher chance that they pick up bugs. We already know of the injuries such as (Bradley) Dack, (Lewis) Holtby, (Ryan) Nyambe and a few others. We’ve brought a couple back and stuck them on the bench not sure if they were going to play, but we’ll brush ourselves down, get ready for the FA Cup and we’ll see how we get on, away at Birmingham City.
“Regardless of the injury, fatigue and the fact it’s in the FA Cup, we still need to go out and play a game of football that we’ll be judged upon. The setbacks are frustrating for us but it’s something that we have to deal with during this time of year and we just need to keep confident and keep going. I think, if you look at the league table now, the one positive is that we’re still only four points away from the playoffs and we’re still very much in that picture which shows how tight the league is. We’ve got a home game in the league against Preston North End after the FA Cup game, which gives us the opportunity to get back to winning ways.
“In terms of January, I’m planning on talking to the Owners. As I’ve always said, we’ll see what the ambition of the club is, and yet, we have spent money over recent windows, but we have to be careful. We’ve come here today to a near-sold-out City Ground and the revenue that clubs like Nottingham Forest can generate is different to the revenue we can generate, in terms of sustainability, so we have to be careful of our expenditure. As I’ve said, there might be some outgoings to make some space for some incomings because I do feel as if we need to turn a few things around if we can, which is never easy to do. You might have ‘wish-lists’ as a manager, but it’s very difficult, unless you have a lot of money available, to have things go as smoothly as you want them to, because deals are always difficult to conclude, especially in January.”
