After witnessing his team crash out of the FA Cup, courtesy of a 1-0 home defeat to League One side Doncaster Rovers in the Third Round, a disappointed Tony Mowbray explained his disappointment regarding his side’s lack of prolificacy in-front of goal.
“It’s always disappointing to go out of the FA Cup, especially against a lower league team at home where the expectation would be on us as the Championship side facing a League One side, to win. We huffed and puffed today. We kept possession of the ball and dominated the game, but generally we couldn’t finish the chances that fell our way. Doncaster probably had one really good chance and another half-chance throughout the whole game and they took managed to win 1-0, so that’s another day where we’ve lost 1-0 despite dominating the game, but there’s nothing we can do about it now, so we’ll move on.
“We managed to craft some good chances today, as I told them in the dressing room. At the end of the day, you get judged on results as a football team, so despite all our good play today, we have to put the ball in the back of the net and win games, that’s what football is about and we didn’t manage to do that and paid the price for it. I wouldn’t say any momentum has been lost after last week’s win at Birmingham City. We made enough changes today in order for a different group to be out there. I think it’s important that we refreshed and give breaks to the likes of Adam (Armstrong), Harvey (Elliott) and Joe (Rothwell), because they’ve played a lot of football in a short space of time and if we expect them to play a lot of games throughout the second-half of the season, they needed to mentally switch off from football for a bit, but unfortunately we had to utilise them today, because we fell behind. It seems like a pretty common theme, particularly at home where we go behind in games and today, we didn’t manage to recover, unlike times where we have done in the past.
“I don’t think I’ve given anyone real ‘chances’ because everyone who was in the squad has been part of our matchday squads all season. It wasn’t really a case of giving a load of debuts, it was just moving players around and freshening the team up with players in order to give others a rest. I’m not going to stand here and say ‘I gave you a chance and you didn’t take it’, I just rotating the squad around and gave those who desperately needed a break some time off, but sadly we couldn’t give them 90 minutes.
“Although (Bradley) Dack and (Lewis) Travis played today, they were miles off the pace of the team and their own peak, fitness-wise. Generally, when the ball comes to Dack in and around the six-yard box, he puts it away and yet their ‘keeper made a great save from the one main chance he had. They’ve both got some way to go, which is evident. I’m not going to be daft and say ‘they’ve been brilliant and they’re ready to play 90 minutes every week’, no because that’s not the case. However, as I’ve said over the past few weeks, the only way to get them fit is to give them both game time, because we can’t train properly due to the intense fixture list. This week has been difficult on an icy pitch because we’ve had no surfaces to train on, so we’ve spent the last two days here at Ewood, as opposed to being in an indoor arena.
“The only way to help them both build up their fitness and reach their peaks is to give them game time. That doesn’t mean start them in every game, it means drip them in off the bench and yet, as I’ve said we’re in the results business, so if they’re both not up to speed, then we’re not going to jeopardise the team for their fitness and that means they’re going to have to build fitness as a substitute. They’ll both undoubtedly benefit from playing today. We just need to see how much game time we can give them as we move forward. Let’s hope we’ll be winning three or four-nil by then and we can put them on for more than the standard 20-30 minutes they’ve been getting.”
