After witnessing his side snatch a late 98th minute winner in their 2-1 home victory over Rotherham United, Tony Mowbray beamed with delight as he discussed the 90 minutes of football with the club’s media team.
“It was a tough, difficult game for us tonight, because they are a team that give 110% every game. They all run around, chase down and fight for every ball. They’re a big group of lads and they can put any free-kick straight into your box and cause you trouble. It’s not easy to play against. You can’t press them from the front, because they don’t play out from the back and so it becomes a scrappy affair in which you hope your quality will help you to come out on top. That didn’t look the case tonight for a very long time, but thankfully, it did in the end.
“Football is about getting over the line and we managed to do that, regardless of tonight’s overall performance. I’ve always said that we have to find ways to win games, because we can’t be brilliant with the ball and cut through teams and make chances every single game. It’s particularly hard against teams who don’t play with the ball in their half, because play in and around your box by pumping the ball up top. That makes it very difficult for us to build up what we’ve been doing all year, which means we have to improve in our own build-up. Saying that, Rotherham work really hard from the front. They have two strikers, they push their wing-backs really high up the field in order to press and then they’ve got two attacking midfielders who also push, which effectively makes it a six-man press. It’s really hard to play through a six-man press, in the manner that we want to play football. Yet, if you don’t play through it, you end up giving the ball back to them by going long, and they keep booting it back to you, which makes it into a scrappy game and that’s what tonight was. We didn’t have the control that we would normally like or expect to have, yet we won the game, so let’s put the points in the bag and move on.
“I’ve just said to my staff before coming out here, that we won’t be overanalysing this game. They’re all in tomorrow and normally, we’d have a team meeting where we’d run through the positives and negatives of the game, but I’ve just said that we might not even have one tomorrow. We’ve got Stoke City on Saturday, who’ll be a totally different test who, we need to focus preparing for. Tonight’s game was miles different; it was almost like we were playing another sport to the game we played against Norwich City last Saturday(!) We just need quickly move on and start to concentrate on Stoke.
“Harvey (Elliott) is a wonderful footballer. Without embarrassment, I tell the team to give the ball to that 17-year old boy, because more often than not, he makes the right decision on when to pass and how to weight it. He helps our team function and we’re delighted that he’s now adding goals to the quality he already brings. Adam (Armstrong) is developing a real striker’s instinct, thankfully for us. I’ve just said to him in the dressing room that, that goal puts him back on the goalscoring track. Let’s hope he can grab a couple on Saturday, then grabs a hattrick and a couple more in the coming games. He hadn’t scored for two or three games, which makes it seem like a drought by his standards, so it’s nice to see him grab the winner late on for us. Adam is so good in training. He can hit them off both feet, he’s electric and yet I do feel as if there was a lot of media speculation around him over the past few games. He was at the top of the goalscoring charts against Ivan Toney, the club were the league’s top scorers and then we were on the tele against Bristol City and all of that kept the spotlight on him.
“Against Bristol, he had nine shots and they were all around 35-yards out from goal, as if he was trying too hard. I’ve told him that he just has to play his game, because his natural movement will get him in-front of goal and his rewards. I’ve said that he doesn’t have to shoot every time he gets the ball and that he should play for the team, like he has been doing all year, because the goals will start flowing again. It’s not really been a case of me singling him out, there’s been a fine balance to the situation, because I think he’s been self-conscious of it. I didn’t want to make more of it, it was basically just a two-second chat to tell him to relax and ‘do what he does’. If he continues playing his natural game and gets in-front of goal, the team will create the chances for him; he just needs to finish them off. Although we know he has the quality to nutmeg someone and stick in into the top corner from 20-30 yards out, you can’t score those goals every game. The forwards who score 20-30 goals a season score a majority of them in a ‘killer zone’ that generally covers the width of the posts, up until the penalty spot. Adam has scored a lot in that zone this year, and I’m sure he’ll score a lot more as the season continues.”
