Despite dominating most of the tie, only to miss a second-half penalty and lose in added time, a visibly agitated Tony Mowbray reflected on his side’s second defeat in three games, following Bristol City’s late 1-0 win at Ewood Park.
“I can’t put into words how it feels to come away from today, empty-handed. Football can be cruel at times and it’s very difficult to put the feelings of myself and the team across, at this moment. To see the effort, work, desire to get the result and then suffer as we did is very hard, but it’s done now, and we can’t do anything about it and we have to move our focus onto the next game.
“It’s been a familiar story of late with us not taking the chances we’ve created in games. I can’t stand here and criticise anybody, because I believe they’re all working extraordinarily hard. This game was very similar to the away game against Sheffield United, as we also had an opportunity to score a penalty to put ourselves ahead, but we missed and fell late on to an injury time goal to deny us any points. It’s a really frustrating period for us, but we have to bite the bullet and keep working hard in training and see where it takes us.
“There’s no magic formula, that’s football. Chances come and chances go and I was asked about the lack of goals in the press-conference, but we’ve missed a penalty today, as well as some pretty good chances, but the greater concern is if you’re not creating those chances and not having a shot at the opposition’s goal in the first place, because then you know you have things to work on. I don’t think that’s the case with us, because we’re creating the chances. Today was a game where I could feel Bristol City’s threat early on. Antoine Semenyo is a good player, who is capable of sitting defenders down and getting a shot away, but I’d have to say that I didn’t really see their goal coming. It was like the Alamo during the last 20 minutes, in their box, but that’s football, we should expect things like that to happen. It’s a disappointing day for us and we’re left with no points.
“After we had a horrific run of fixtures, in my opinion, where we played a lot of the top teams away from home in a short period of time, we’ve had three games on the bounce that we’ve targeted nine points from and yet we’ve only come away with one point from the first two games, which is pretty damaging from a psychological perspective. We have to be strong, stick together and get ready to go again against Derby County on Tuesday night.
“It’s not easy to get the players going again after such a tough week. We’re all human beings and I heard Antonio Conte from Tottenham Hotspur a while back saying that he feels as if you ‘die for a day’ after such a blow. I would agree with him as, you put so much work and effort into a game and when you don’t come away with the result you want, it does feels as if you ‘die for a day’, as Conte said. It’s probably wrong to say that when there’s a war going on in another part of the world, but football is tough some days and today is one of those days.
“You have to take these types of blows on the chin, but the bigger picture for Bradley Dack is that he’s back on the grass playing for the team. Hopefully we can filter him back into the team over the next six weeks or so. Let’s wait and see whether we can get him into a position where he’s capable of starting games for us, before the end of the season. At this moment, we have to stick together, keep working hard and see if we can convert some of the opportunities that come our way.
“We’ll be doing our upmost to try and come away from six points before the international break towards the end of March. There are no easy games in this league, no matter who you play. Bristol City had lost three on the bounce before today, so it would be easy to think, ‘oh they’re in bad form, we’ll beat them easily’. We felt as if we could have beaten them at home and maybe we should have beaten them at home, but we didn’t. We know every game is tough and we know that Derby County are fighting for their lives, but things are tough.
“I remember when I first came to this club, we had 15 games left and we were second-bottom of the Championship and out of the games we had left, we only lost three. That showed the fighting spirit and togetherness of that group to not get rolled over too easily and so, every team you play who are looking over their shoulder are fighting for every point, so there’s no easy games, no matter if you’re playing the teams at the top or those at the bottom.”
