After Rovers kept their first home clean sheet of the season, which came in a 2-0 win over Reading at Ewood Park, a delighted Tony Mowbray reflected on his team’s first win in four games, to RoversTV.
“Today was a really important day and the result shows that. We had to grind that result out. I said to them at the end that, we had to dig in and be attritional in order to get the job done. Reading are a decent football team, who are suffering from some injuries at the job end of the pitch and are probably missing the cutting edge of the likes of Lucas João and Yakou Méïté and they lost Michael Olise to Crystal Palace, which means they’re quite different from last year. Thankfully we managed to keep them out and score two really good goals, even though we probably could have got more towards the end. Let’s put the points in the bag, have a good week’s training and concentrate on our trip to Derby County, next week to see if we can start picking points back up, on the road.
“We’re finding a way to score goals regularly, at home. Two goals seem to be a pretty regular occurrence for us this season, which we added a five-goal-haul to once, against Cardiff City. We need to keep going and try to build our season off of our home form, as every team does. You need to earn most of your points from your home games and every away game in this league is tough. You can see the nature of the league, even though there are probably two or three teams better than the rest, it seems to me as if a lot of teams are very similar and you have to grind out the tight games in order to make sure you come out on the winning side. If I’m being honest, and I say this only to you as the club’s media, I think we’re in that pack. If you finish top of that pack, you’ve got every chance of finishing in the top six, but if you finish bottom of that pack, you could finish 16th or 17th. My only frustration from today are the two players we lost, in Ryan Nyambe and Daniel Ayala. Those issues denied us to make the substitutions that we’d like to, and yet, it worked out alright today for us. I’d hope that Ryan and Danny aren’t seriously hurt and have a chance to be in contention for next week, but we won’t know until next week.
“Daniel is an experienced player, and I should have said to him that, if he was feeling his calf before the game, he should have told me in the week. I had a difficult conversation in the week with Jan Paul van Hecke about why he had to sit this one out and why the shape of the team was going to change for this particular game and yet, if Daniel had told me he wasn’t feeling 100%, then I would have been able to make a decision and I would have left him out of the starting-eleven in order to help him heal and that would have allowed Jan Paul to play. It’s all about getting the points on a matchday and it’s all about the group of players we’ve got. They all worked extremely hard today and I’m delighted with them and for them, that they managed to get the three points.
“I played Sam (Gallagher) down the middle today and after we took Ryan off and put (John) Buckley at right-back, I wanted to shuffle the front-three around a bit, so I put Ben (Brereton Díaz) down the middle, Sam on the right and Tyrhys (Dolan) on the left. We felt as if Ben down the middle is a bit tighter with his first touch and his turning, than Sam. Within seconds of that change, Sam had scored and I was having a laugh with him at full-time suggesting he should stay on the right! He’s a handful for any defender, he’s 6’4”, he’s fast and strong so he’s got a lot of ammunition and armour to his arsenal.
“The flexibility of our front-three is huge. If Ben hadn’t been scoring so regularly, the fans would have probably been thinking that Dolan should have been playing off the left, because he was brilliant today and he showed remarkable technique to bend the ball into the corner. I think Ben can definitely play down the middle and I don’t think that will curtail his goal output. He’s capable of controlling the ball in tight areas, he can play on the turn and he gets into the box because he has the hunger and desire to score goals now. Tyrhys off the left, Ben down the middle and Sam on the right might be something we look towards in future games. I wanted to try and get (Reda) Khadra on the pitch, because he’s been flying in training after coming back from an illness. He flew past Ryan in training, the other day and we were all stunned, because we’d never seen anyone do that to Nyambe. However, Reda is someone we’ve got up our sleeve who we’ll hopefully release on this league in the coming weeks.
“The clean sheet was great for the defence, psychologically. I had a bit of a sermon before the game about clean sheets and how it has to hurt you as defenders, if you concede, even if you’re winning 5-0. Any goal has to hurt, and you have to assess and demand off the players who are in-front of you, to do their jobs and track their runners and you have to put your bodies on the line. That’s just me trying to grow a mentality out of our defenders, so that they want to not lose a goal in any game, no matter the scoreline. All positive results stem from not conceding goals and when you mount up the clean sheets, the points come along with them. We’ve tried to instil that mentality in them and hopefully today will be the first of many more clean sheets.
“Jan Paul (van Hecke) probably has to work on his finishing, doesn’t he?! Why he didn’t just slide the ball in with his left-foot, I don’t know?! It probably could have just hit him and gone it, it was harder to miss, I think! It was amazing how he got involved after winning the ball back on the edge of our box and he kept running. Why he kept running forwards, I don’t know, because we haven’t worked on anything like that, but it was really good play! We work a lot on heading balls that are dropped towards the back-post, back across the box and Jan Paul seemingly scuffed it wide in-front of what was virtually an open goal. I’m more relieved that we earnt the three points as a team. It looked as if we were drained of a bit of confidence, today. I felt like we weren’t as fluid as we could be or have been during the first few weeks of this season, particularly in the first-half. Yet, as I’ve said many times, we have a lot of young players who are under-23 and they needed to win that game to give us the belief and confidence, going into the next run of games where we will hopefully be able to pick up a few more points.”
