After Rovers won their fourth game on the bounce, which included four clean sheets in a row, Tony Mowbray reflected on his side’s fantastic performance, as they went to Dorset and beat league leaders Bournemouth, 2-0, on their home patch, as Mowbray was able to celebrate his 100th win in charge of Rovers, in style.
“I’m delighted for the lads because the work-ethic, determination and focus they showed to try and apply the tactics was brilliant. When it comes off and you get a result like today it all feels worth it, really. We’ve got a six-hour bus journey back now, but the points are in the bag, which is all that matters. We played against an exceptionally good team today and that needs to be said. They’ve got some wonderful footballers, but we found a way to win, and I’m delighted for the team. I’ve already said this to them, but they need to make sure that next Saturday, at home to Birmingham City, they produce the same work-ethic, determination and focus. That’ll be a different game to the one we’ve just had today, Birmingham won’t be making 700-800 passes, they’ll be putting the ball into our box for Lukas Jutkiewicz to get on the end of and their big centre-half (Marc Roberts) will be utilising his long throw to throw it in from all angles and we have to be able to deal with that different challenge. That’s the Championship, though, you play against lots of different teams who have different ideas on how the game’s played, but the teams who eventually get to the top of the table are the ones who find ways to beat certain teams.
“I was pleased with how we took our chances today. We’ve been doing a lot of work recently on transitions or counter-attacking or whatever people want to call it. A lot of people laugh at me when I talk about transitions and ask whether I mean counter-attacking. So, what I mean by that is, we set traps for the opposition and let really good teams spread out and allow them to push their full-backs high and wide up the field when then allows us to nick the ball and play into the spaces they leave behind with the likes of Ben Brereton Díaz, Tyrhys Dolan, Reda Khadra, Sam Gallagher and John Buckley among others, who show they have great quality and awareness of where the spaces are.
“It was almost an experienced performance by our young group, and they deserve lots and lots of credit. As I’ve warned them already, we mustn’t get carried away, because this is a tough league, and you can just see us being bitten on the backside next week against Birmingham where we lose to two set-pieces or something like that. We need to focus and go into every game with belief. Let’s be good at what we do and try and beat the teams that we hope we can beat and try and make life difficult for the better teams in the league. Let’s see where things take us one game at a time. Birmingham City are a really good side with a lot of physicality, and are different to Bournemouth, but I think they’re all dangerous games. As we prepare differently for each game, my overriding fear are of the injuries.
“We picked up two injuries today and Scott Wharton was ill. Bradley Johnson came on and seemed to have got injured, and (Jan Paul) van Hecke was asking to come off after we’d made the changes, so we potentially come away from this game with five injuries. Let’s hope that they all recover throughout the week. I think we’ll probably send Ryan Nyambe for a scan, because we don’t want to risk him, given that he was feeling his hamstring. Everybody else won’t need scans. Scott was touch-and-go to start, but we asked him to play because he gives us such a good balance off the left. At half-time, he was really ill and I cajoled him onto the pitch, but he felt way below par, almost washed out and we decided to take him off for Daniel Ayala. Hopefully he’ll get better in the week. The rest are just knocks and niggles and hopefully, we can give them a few days off their feet and they can be ready for next Saturday.
“Jan Paul’s header was great; one I would have been proud of! Did I ever mention that I scored the winner at Wembley in my final ever game?! It was quite a similar header to Jan Paul’s, as well! To be honest, I think we should be scoring more from set-plays with the likes of Jan Paul, Ayala, (Darragh) Lenihan who’s amazing at attacking the ball late and coming over the top of people, Wharton is also 6’4”, so we should be scoring more. If you’ve got the likes of Sam (Gallagher), Ben (Brereton Díaz), Jan Paul, Ayala, Lenihan and Wharton all on the pitch, then we can score from set-pieces. Other weeks, we might not have all of those players on the pitch, so we end up, as I joke with the team, like ‘seven dwarfs’ out there trying to stop our opposition from scoring set-pieces. They’re all doing their jobs at the moment, so let’s see how far we can go.
“I’m delighted for the fans. Someone told me there was around 900 of them down here supporting us, which is amazing. I saw most of them when I was out for my morning walk along the promenade earlier on. I’m delighted for them, because when they make such an effort it’s great that the team can reward them. There’s obviously been lots of times where the games are difficult, and you don’t get the right result and they come away disappointed after spending a lot of time and a lot of their hard-earned money and they end up getting back home after midnight. Saying that, I’m delighted for everybody associated with the football club today, whether they were here or not, because that was a big result for us today, against a top team who were in the Premier League, not so long ago. On behalf, of everybody at the club, I’d like to thank them all for their amazing support.”
