After Rovers saw their 10-match unbeaten run at Ewood Park end at the hands of promotion-favourites Fulham, courtesy of an Aleksandar Mitrović goal just after the hour-mark. Tony Mowbray expressed his frustrations towards the match officials, who he believed wrongly ruled out a Darragh Lenihan goal due to offside.
“We’re in the business of trying to win matches, and we ultimately didn’t do that today, which is really frustrating for us. I thought the players worked hard and applied themselves well today against a really talented team with some top players who were in the Premier League last year. We knew they’re a good footballing team, but we didn’t try and take them on at football today, we tried to disrupt their pattern and methods and try and nick it off them in their half and counter-attack them, which saw us have some relative success. We were concentrating on being behind the ball and they didn’t really create too many chances. I felt that (Aleksandar) Mitrović’s first real opportunity was his goal, but although we were around him, we let him spin and hit it which is what cost us. I suppose the big frustration for me as a manager is watching back the (Darragh) Lenihan goal that was ruled out for offside, in the dressing room. I’m going to go and see the officials to get their perspective, but from watching it back, you can clearly see it’s a few yards onside. Whether they guessed that somebody touched it on the way through, I don’t know, but from my view it should have stood. We ended up having to chase an equaliser, but it wasn’t to be today. (Sam) Gallagher had a good effort saved at their keeper’s (Marek Rodák) near-post but Fulham hung on at the death, despite Christian (Walton) denying them a late second. Sometimes, you have to take chances and sacrifice defensive duties in order to try and grab an equaliser, but I thought it was a great effort by the team against a good side. We have to get back on track on Tuesday at home against Hull City. We have to win on Tuesday after not getting anything from today in order to keep our points tally ticking along.
“I’m not the biggest advocate of VAR as I’ve mentioned in the past, but if you look back at some of the decisions that have gone against us over the past few seasons, you think something has to be done about the standard of refereeing, particularly at this level. I think back to the FA Cup game we had here, last season, against Newcastle United, where their third goal was blatantly offside, but I’m not sure what the answer is. I listen to the officials all game long and they’re are all chatting away on their microphones. The linesmen and fourth official are basically giving the referee a running match commentary of who has the ball, who’s passed it to who and there’s so many different voices in his ear. But why they get the big decisions wrong? I have no idea. Ultimately, I can’t change the result now. Hopefully the officials lose a bit of sleep tonight, over the offside goal decision, if they see it back, but they probably won’t. That’s football, unfortunately, sometimes you get good luck, sometimes you get bad luck, but hopefully we get a decision like this go our way that allows us to win a tight game.
“I wasn’t too pleased with how the players conducted themselves in the final minutes of the game because, in my opinion, they didn’t put the ball into the box enough to test their defenders. We had some great chances to deliver the ball. Amari’i (Bell) was messing around on the wing, trying to play one-twos when he should have just delivered it into the box and force Fulham to defend. We’ve got (Danny) Graham and (Sam) Gallagher in the box with Dominic (Samuel), Adam (Armstrong) and eventually Ben (Brereton) at the back-post. The ball just has to go into the box. If they head it back out, that’s fine, (Lewis) Travis will just recycle it back out wide and it’ll come back in before something eventually breaks for us. We didn’t put the ball in the box enough when gambling like that. All of those players aren’t tracking back and doing the defensive side of the game that midfielders would do, normally, which puts more urgency on getting the ball into the box. Strikers can be a liability when you’re playing ‘out of possession’ football but in the last 10 minutes, when you’re pumping balls into the box, that’s when they come alive, but they have to get the delivery in order to score. If I was a centre-forward not getting the delivery, today, I would have been frustrated.
“The league is still really tight. We just have to win games and get ourselves on a run, like we’ve been saying for a while. If you win three or four on the bounce in this league, you can end up anywhere really, so we have to focus on rebounding and getting some good results. Today’s just been frustrating because we’ve talked about the top teams coming here, and we’ve still got West Bromwich Albion and Leeds United to come. They’re going to be tight games where we’re going to be playing ‘out of possession’ a lot, so we have to have the ability to nick a goal and potentially the game itself, in order to win those tight games, as we’ve done in the past, but it wasn’t quite to be today.”
