Following Rovers’ second away victory of the campaign which saw them survive a late Derby County onslaught to come away from Pride Park with a 2-1 victory, boss Tony Mowbray expressed his delight as his side grabbed their second consecutive victory.
“Things got a bit nervy towards the end! But that’s football. We’ve had a few of them this season and we’ve ended up dropping points, but we saw it out today. I’ve talked continuously about learning on the job and let’s hope that as the season rolls on and we have some big games where we need to keep a lead, we can learn from today’s game and understand that we need to slow it down. We can’t keep booting the ball back to them, we have to secure the possession with the first pass from the back to the midfield and they need to turn and slide the strikers in for the third and fourth goals. I thought we could have done that on multiple occasions in the first-half today. This is a really young team who have to learn on the job, which they are. You can’t expect anyone to understand everything about football at 21 or 22. I hope they learn from today when they watch it back in training.
“It’s okay to defend deep, but then you have to stick the first pass into a teammate who can turn and feed the striker, then you’ll reap the benefits because the opposition will feel the threat and not throw as many men forwards and the game won’t become end-to-end. Despite all that, we can go home happy with the three points. The first-half performance warranted the victory, because the game should have been out of sight by half-time and I thought that that was probably as good of a first-half as we’ve played this season. Everything we’ve worked on was put into practice and we got the right result.
“We were more of a possession-based team last season and we played on the front-foot and Derby do try and build from the back, yet at half-time they put the big lad, (Sam Baldock), on and played off the front a bit more and made things a bit more difficult for us. There could be some similarities to last season’s game here, because we scored a lot of goals and to be honest, I feel we could have scored more in the first-half which would have made it very similar to last year but the main thing is that we got the points. We picked up a few knocks and made a few changes because the game was so intense. The intensity doesn’t help us get players up to speed when they’re coming in cold off the bench. We played this game without three regular defenders in Ryan Nyambe, Daniel Ayala and Harry Pickering who were all absent and yet, I can’t remember Derby threatening us in the first-half. This game had plenty of positives which we’ll take, along with the points, into our upcoming home games. They’re two difficult home games against Fulham and Sheffield United. Fulham scored three without reply against West Bromwich Albion in the early kick-off, so Wednesday night will be a great challenge to see where we are in this league.
“I was really impressed with the defensive unit today. I thought we had total control in the first-half and they linked onto the press really well and stepped in when they had to and they caused Derby problems. Jan Paul (van Hecke) could have scored but hit the post and Darragh (Lenihan) caused carnage inside their box from set-pieces. I stand here with the points and I understand how difficult football is when you have a young team, but we’re happy with the result. We could have ended up with a few more wins in some of the games we’ve dropped points in, where we shouldn’t have. Yet today was a day that went in our favour.
“The impact of the supporters is so important in football and always has been. The fans are the 12th man of any football club and they provide a huge boost to any player, let along the young ones in our squad. I keep repeating and emphasising that we have a young squad, but they are a group that need emotional help. It was really interesting to see the dressing room at the end, because there was a lot of anger and frustration over the fact, we nearly threw two goals away again and their first thought was, ‘come on, we have to be better.’ That reaction is telling me that the players now have a recognition of how hard we have to keep working in order to get to where we want to be.
“Three points in this league, at any stage, is massive. Some teams have drawn four or five on the bounce and they’re only getting one point each time, whereas they might as well win one and lose two, because you’re getting the same points tally. Three points in any game and in any league is huge, but especially so in this division given how tight it is. It doesn’t give us a free hit, because we’ll give it our all against two sides who were in the Premier League, last season, but we’ll compete, be energetic, be on the front-foot and we’ll ask questions of them and yet, Fulham and Sheffield United do have some high-quality footballers who are capable of playing right through the press, over the press or around the press. We talked in the dressing room about how experienced Premier League players know the best type of pass for the situation at hand and these games will be a great challenge to help develop the team and games we should be looking forward to in order to show what we’re capable of.”
