After witnessing his side crumble to their tenth away defeat of the season, which came on Tuesday night, courtesy of a 1-0 Reading victory which was broadcasted live on Sky Sports, Tony Mowbray offered his thoughts on the fine margins that saw his side start March with a loss.
“I think there were a lot of real positives from our team, tonight. I thought there was a good general control of the game. We’ve just been having a long chat in the dressing room about how many men get in the box. If you think back to the first 20 games of the season where we were having 20-odd shots per game and scoring fours and fives at times, that looks a long way away, at the moment. Is it the personnel? We’re just trying to find the answers, really. (Ryan) Nyambe and (Amari’i) Bell must’ve put 20-odd crosses in each tonight, or got in-behind their backline so many times, and yet we can’t seem to pick the right pass as the last twenty metres is a real problem for us at the moment as we aren’t picking the right passes, or finishing the chances and the possession that we have. It’s a real frustration for us, but we have to keep working on it. I really like these players, they’re a great bunch of kids and they want to know the answers and we’re trying to find them out together, yet when you have days like today, it’s really frustrating not to score, when all of the good play probably warranted a goal.
“Maybe the cutting edge in the final third is the missing piece of the jigsaw? Saying that, we’ve got Adam Armstrong who has 20-goals this season. Adam is so delicate, to the point where we were going to bring him off at half-time because he was feeling his hamstring, but we had a debate regarding whether Adam’s hamstring could hold the work-rate. I’ve talked in recent weeks about the workload out full-backs put in down the wings and Adam is the same up-front. Adam’s workload at sprinting is huge and is a real toll on his legs and I said at half-time to the lads and my staff that I didn’t want to miss him for four or five weeks or around eight games because our season will be done if that happens. We were going to take him off, but he was adamant that he wanted to continue, whether there’s a bit of spark off him, I’m not sure, but that’s a dilemma for us moving forwards in that we can’t just play Adam for 90 minutes every game, so we have to find a solution for the strike-force.
“Reading didn’t really threaten to carve us open, which is part of why I thought it was a decent performance. We didn’t really give up any chances, and yet we gave them a goal from nothing. Harvey (Elliott) has apologised to the team, even though I thought there wasn’t a need for him to apologise. He’s been brilliant all year for us and has created so many opportunities for this team to score goals and things like that will happen sometimes when you ask your team to be brave on the ball. Sometimes, when you ask them to play with the ball, they’ll be caught in poor areas, as we’ve seen happen a lot, particularly in the Premier League, where a lot of teams are playing football in their own box. We don’t do that, but Harvey got caught in a poor position and cost us, but he’s been fantastic ever since he walked through the door, so I’m not going to stand here and criticise his performance. He has to learn from it and so do other players when they make mistakes, but as I’ve said, he’s a wonderful footballer and he’s humble enough to acknowledge the mistake and we will put it behind us and move on.
“Every game is different. We played against a deep back-three on Saturday when Coventry City came to Ewood. They came and played with two strikers and everybody seems to be playing that way against us this season, whilst also pressing high and that takes away a bit of our control on the game. Today, we found the answer to that, which was to play through the pressure and the next game will be just the same as in we need to find the solutions as no team plays the exact same as the other. You can’t go into games thinking ‘there’s the standard for us and we need to do that every week’, because, although I haven’t had time to study Millwall yet, I presume they’re going to be playing a back-three with wing-backs and three in midfield with a big centre-forward, which means Saturday will be a totally different proposition to tonight. We have to try and manage that game and the different problems it will give us and we have to see if we can find the answers in order to get that elusive victory.”
