Following Rovers’ first home defeat since February 2020, Tony Mowbray categorised Rovers’ 3-1 home defeat to top of the table Leeds United as ‘continued poor form’ after successive defeats to Wigan Athletic and Barnsley in the prior games. The gaffer also talked about his plans for team, for the future.
“I think this game was slightly different to the last two given the opponents we’ve played. I can’t stand here and say, ‘we should have won today’, whereas in the last two games, I think we didn’t deserve to lose either game, I felt we should have won them both, yet we lost both. Today, we played against a team that are a running machine. I was just asking the players, ‘what’s it like to play left-wing against Luke Ayling?’, because he must have been in our six-yard box around 100 times throughout the game, because he never stops running. I want the team to enjoy football. I want them to love it and play like they used to play in the playground. I want them to enjoy the ball, get it, pop it, move it, run. I want them to enjoy tackling and enjoy testing themselves against the opposition. I don’t want football to become a burden for the players. I want them to enjoy it, and if we get beat, I’ll take the flack.
“I sometimes feel as if there’s fear, anxiety or a lack of bravery within the squad, which can happen, especially if you’ve got some young players within the squad. It’s no disgrace to lose to Leeds United. I thought the gap between the sides today wasn’t big and we could have scored two or three goals comfortably, had we taken our chances. We said that at Wigan and at Barnsley, but at this moment, the top end of the pitch isn’t firing on all cylinders. People could say that, that could be because I’m chopping and changing the players around in order to find the right balance and give everybody a chance, but because of that, they’re lacking the consistency needed. (Dominic) Samuel missed some really good chances over the past two games and yet he wasn’t playing today. Will he be disappointed because, at least he had the chances? Probably. Yet today, Big Sam (Gallagher) had the chances and didn’t put them in the net and Lewis (Holtby) hit the post. Those types of chances must go in, because they make the difference. I’m trying not to be overly defensive. I thought we were okay today, but there were a lot of things that I wasn’t happy with, but simultaneously, there were things I was happy with. You have to praise the players and say ‘well done’ because they fought hard against the team top of the division.
“I just felt we weren’t brave enough to go for the jugular. If you’re not brave, aggressive and play on the front-foot, you don’t win promotion or league titles, you end up plodding around in mid-table, like we’re doing now. In my opinion, after coming out of League One, we’re past plodding around in mid-table. So, you’re either going to have to come on the journey or not, or some other manager might get the chance to continue the journey. It’s not my decision, of course, but these players either want to come along and give us a chance to get out of this division, or they don’t. Saying that, you can’t finish first, second or win the playoffs without being having belief and being brave, both home and away. They have to not worry about what’s behind them and have to be aggressive in their play. There’s just a bit of reluctance in the team at the moment to be as positive as I’d like them to be.
“I think they have to evolve from young men, into men and begin to trust in themselves and their teammates. I’ve had a long chat with them after full-time in the dressing room, around half-an-hour long, not telling them off or shouting at them, just talking to them about what it takes to reach the heights of the Premier League. When they play and reach the Premier League, they’ll find out what world-class quality footballers are, and there aren’t any of those in the Championship. Maybe, Jack Grealish was one, last season, but I can’t think of anyone this season, in the Championship who fits that bill. I tell stories to my players about who I played against. I played against (Sir) Kenny Dalglish and I had to face Kevin Keegan on my league debut at 18. When you play against world-class players, you can feel it, because you can’t kick him. I was this raw 18-year old who wanted to make my mark by kicking lumps out of Kevin, yet I couldn’t get near him. I’ve said to the lads that they’ll feel the quality in the Premier League, if they ever get there, but in this league, I’ve said to them that they shouldn’t look be looking over their shoulders, they should be pushing and playing on the front-foot and impose themselves onto the opposition. That’s what I’m trying to create, a brave, aggressive side who play on the front-foot, and when we get beat, the other team have to be at the top of their game to beat us. We need to try and make them believe that and take it onto the grass each week. It’s not an easy process to indoctrinate all 25 or so players to see the same picture, it takes a lot of work on the grass.
“I think the players are a bit low on belief given what happened this week, especially the forwards. They’ve been out for 12 weeks not practicing and building their confidence up, so when they’ve got me on the touchline screaming at them to work hard, run and fight, when the chance eventually does come, they snatch at it and it doesn’t go in. Maybe, if they’d have been on the training ground over the past few months, they might have been more composed and picked the right finish. I think it’s a balance. All of our forwards, bar Danny (Graham) are all pretty young in their early twenties and it’s something that will hopefully develop in the coming months and years and when we are on top and playing this aggressive, front-foot style of play, they’ll be the ones benefitting from it.
“We just have to try and win the next game. There’s no point talking about the playoffs and speculating because it’s out of our hands. We just have to do our own jobs and see what happens. Our next game is at Cardiff City who have been on an amazing run. They’re a big, strong, physical team and we have to go there and impose our style of play on them in order to try and get a win, or if things don’t go well, we’ll get bullied and come away with nothing. That’s the challenge for the team. There’s a challenge every game, but that’s at the forefront of our minds for Cardiff. After that game, we need to focus on Millwall who are up after Cardiff. Both of those teams are above us, yet if we can get six points, we could potentially suck them back into the mix and we could get close to them, who knows? There are no huge expectations from me that we’re going to win five games on the bounce and sneak into the playoffs. We hope we can do that, and I think we’re capable of doing that, yet realistically, I’m not expecting that to happen, given the strength of the opposition we’ve still got to play. Between those games, we’re back at Ewood to play West Brom who have got some high-quality individuals who can cause trouble. Let’s just see how many points we get. I’ve said before that we need to get more than last year’s tally of 60 points because we have to show some level of improvement. The fact that we’ve not been looking over our shoulders, but we’ve been targeting the playoffs for most of the second-half of the season, for me, is an improvement. It’ll be sad for us if our season just dribbles away, and at the moment, after three defeats in a row, that is happening to us. It’s up to us to stop that happening and get some results on the board.”
