After notching his second goal of the campaign, Dominic Samuel’s delight couldn’t be wiped off his face as he reflected on an eventful 90 minutes, after Rovers’ 3-2 win away at Cardiff City, on Tuesday night.
“Tonight’s performance and result were massive, especially after the poor run of form we’ve had heading into tonight. This result shows that when we keep working hard as a group, keep sticking together and don’t drop our heads, it shows the quality that our team has, which we showed tonight. The performance has always been there for us, but it’s just the goals that we’ve been lacking, and I personally think we should have scored more than we have done, recently. I think tonight showed that we’ve got the players in the squad who can step up and make the difference, as well as continue to fight until things go right. We had a game plan tonight and we stuck with it, despite being behind at half-time. We didn’t drop our heads and continued and thankfully the hard work paid off.
“The start of the second-half just summarises the fun of football, really. We went from going crazy because we didn’t get a penalty, to the elation of levelling the scoring, within seconds. That’s the good thing about football. As a striker, you want to score goals and even if things aren’t going your way, you just have to keep going and that’s what we showed tonight. My goal was pure instinct, to be honest. All the best strikers get within the six-yard box and the gaffer has been telling me that as well and tonight it showed that if you’re in those kinds of positions, the ball will eventually fall for you, and it did tonight. I probably do need to be a bit greedier when it comes to my options and my positioning. With me sometimes, I’m looking out for my teammates and I like to feed them in before trying a shot myself, but I think as a striker you have to be selfish every now and again and I’m starting to feel that.
“(Adam) Armstrong’s goal was a crap goal(!) No, seriously, it was an amazing finish. It just shows Arma’s been on top form since day one. He’s on fire this season, I think he’s got around 15 goals so far, this season, so the numbers show his quality. He’s on fire and that’s what every striker should want to be like, they should want to be a goal threat every game. Arma’s been making difficult finishes easy for years now. I’ve known him for years when I was out on loan and came up against him and he’s always been a scorer of special goals and I think he’s always improving at it. This season has been massive for him and the team. I know we’ve been up and down this season, but we’re finding our feet again, which is the main thing.
“We’ll keep fighting until the last whistle of the season. I know we lost three on the bounce, but it isn’t over until it’s over and that’s the funny thing about football because things can change so quickly overnight or over the course of a week. We’ll keep fighting and we’ll see what happens. We’ve played without any pressure tonight and I don’t see why we can’t force it down to the wire during the last four games of the season, because we’ve shown tonight, what sort of team we can be. West Brom will be a huge game, but I think after tonight’s result we can go into that game, at home, with lots of confidence and the same mentality and mindset as we did tonight, and I don’t see why we can’t replicate tonight’s result on Saturday.”
