After Rovers fell to their second defeat in five games after a controversial Ivan Toney penalty secured the win for Brentford, in-front of the Sky Sports cameras, Tony Mowbray’s post-match focus was on Bradley Dack, who was sadly stretchered off the field in the closing moments of the game with another suspected Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury.
“I can only go by what the doctors and the physios are saying, and they think Bradley’s injury is a bad one. Brad’s in a lot of pain in the dressing room. He’s on gas at the moment and trying to stay calm, with all the players around him. Although we do need proper confirmation via a scan, but the early signs don’t look good. He’s in a bad way, emotionally, in there. We’ve all witnessed how hard he’s worked to come back from the last injury. It’s horrific when you watch a footballer, on their own every day, trying to get back to where he wants to get too. It’s been a longer journey than most for him and it took a year because he had a few setbacks. For him to come back and then get two goals in two games whilst also looking a threat, tonight, was good, but this is a really sad situation for him. The most important thing here, is player welfare and I’ve said to him in there that, he’s part of this family and we will look after him and make sure he has the very best care and treatment. What else can we do? It’s really sad seeing him very emotional in there, because we all know how hard he worked to get back from the first injury.
“There isn’t much you can say to a player at a time like this. All the players are in there hugging him and comforting him and even David Raya’s in there with him, because he’s really concerned. Dacky’s almost like the ‘life and soul’ of the football club. Even when he’s been working hard trying to get back, you can always hear his voice, whether he’s shouting and joking with the lads, so it is quite an emotional moment for everybody. We do need to wait and see what the proper diagnosis is after it settles down. I like to think we’ll do our best as a club to support him and I hope the fans will do the same. I just want to focus on the football for the rest of this interview, because it’s hard to talk about Bradley at the moment. To put it into context, I’ve just come out of a room full of emotional players and it’s quite upsetting.
“In terms of the game, I didn’t recognise the team in the first-half. It looked like a team that had had nine days rest, against a team that had played four games in ten days and we weren’t at the races. I have to take responsibility for that, because I picked the team that I thought could go again, yet, if I made wholesale changes and we played poorly, I’d get criticised. I wanted to give that selection the chance to go again against a good Brentford team, and yet you can see that the changes at the break made a massive impact. We looked more like ourselves in the second-half and created the chances including a couple of big penalty shouts, but it wasn’t to be. At least I recognised the team, in the second period and we looked as if we could give Brentford, who are right at the top end of this division, a lot of problems. I’ve seen both penalty incidents again and I’d have to say, although I might be looking through rose-tinted glasses, in the context of the game, if their penalty which looked pretty soft was a penalty then both of our claims are, as well. For the claim on Dack, David doesn’t see him and Dack comes in trying to toe the ball away before David lunges across and knocks him over with his hip. The challenge on (Ryan) Nyambe was blatant because their lad (Mads Bech Sørensen) gets wrong side of Ryan, then drags him down because he doesn’t know where he is. If the one on Nyambe in particular, isn’t a penalty, I’ll never know what is. It’s unbelievable how referees can’t make big decisions when they have to. We have to live and die by those decisions, I suppose, and we’re then left frustrated because this team, based on the performance of the second-half, didn’t deserve to lose that match.
“It’s part and parcel of football, though, isn’t it? I thought we competed well in the second-half, but they weren’t miles better than us in the first-half. Yes, they got a penalty, but it was a scrappy game, I felt, in the first-half. There was a lot of competing in midfield and a lot of balls were played forward and we didn’t have any control, whereas we had a lot more control in the second-half and we managed to get a lot more men and balls into the box, which created the chances. Although things did start to break for us, we should have scored, but ultimately, we didn’t. We missed some chances and the referee (Geoff Eltringham) didn’t give us some pretty obvious penalties and that’s football, we have to abide by it.”
