After Rovers won their final match ahead of the season’s second international break by a scoreline of 3-1, over Queens Park Rangers, Blues chief Tony Mowbray reflected on a vital win, with the club’s media team, whilst also informing supporters of the situation regarding injuries and issues with COVID isolations, that could well be solved come his side’s next fixture.
“I think in the context of the last few weeks that we’ve had, today’s result was a big, big, big win for us. I’ve been talking about how the team has been decimated and how it’s almost been unfair on this group of lads, given how hard they train and how hard they work and how desperate they are to do well, that they find a way to win a match and get a result, and it was great to have (Thomas) Kaminski and (Bradley) Johnson back today. Brad’s return gave us some extra power and presence in the midfield, which allowed us to win some headers and some second balls, yet it goes without saying when talking about how crucial Adam (Armstrong) is to this team, by how he’s come back and led the line.
“We had a late upset last night with Lewis Holtby. I got the call at around 11:30pm that he was feeling unwell and had a high temperature, even though he received a negative COVID test recently. Saying that, however, we’ve given him a few days off before we see how he is and re-test him. Maybe he just has a normal cold or flu? I don’t know. What I do know is that the news really disrupted us this morning, because we’ve ended up not playing the team that we’ve been working with all week. I’ve talked about it over the recent week as we’ve had it three or four times and it’s really difficult to deal with.
“I’m hoping that, from this point onwards, the team will only get stronger and I think the evidence from the first-half suggests that this team is going to damage some teams and we should all be enthusiastic and look forward to the rest of the season, as long as we can put out a team, that has the cutting edge like the one that played today has. Although, as they did in the Middlesbrough game, today they showed some great defensive qualities by putting their bodies on the line to block and get their heads on things, so times are looking good for us.
“QPR are a decent team with some good, talented individuals. Mark (Warburton) is a very experienced manager and his understanding of how to build with the ball and how to protect behind the ball are high quality and you can see that with the structure of his team. It was a dangerous game for us, because of their individual talent. I thought we came to the fore today. It wasn’t good to lose Corry (Evans) so early on, but it offered us a chance to play young John (Buckley). I shout at John a lot really, because he wants to play with the ball and when he’s got it at his feet, I never fear that he’s going to do something talented with it, but in these games against these types of teams in the Championship, you have to be good without the ball. You need to be as good without the ball, as you are with the ball and that, particularly in midfield, as we saw against Middlesbrough because we had no other option, if you’re lightweight in there, it can lead to the ball constantly gravitating towards your own goal because we don’t win the second balls or we don’t do the basics well enough if we don’t have the required physicality to compete. Johnson helped us massively in that area today, and the plan was for Corry to do the same and to keep feeding the front three which would have hurt their backline, but unfortunately Corry didn’t get an opportunity to do that, before John replaced him. We’re all delighted for Ben (Brereton). He works his socks off for this team. He’s like a trojan, where he’s pretty much playing at left-back one moment and the next he’s bursting down the wing with the ball, tearing at the full-backs and driving the ball into the box. I’ve always said that I liked Ben, he’s a diamond of a kid and we’re glad he’s here. He’s still only a young boy at 21, but he’s working his socks off for the team and the club and hopefully he gets the benefits in the long-term.
“The lads showed the character required after conceding the penalty, which was good because we looked a bit fragile for a few minutes, especially after they had a succession of corners. They played the territory game and it was a bit difficult for us to get up the pitch and yet we finished the game using the space they left behind by coming on to us, in order to break away and kill the game. We counter-attacked very well today, which highlights how crucial Adam is to what we do when we have to defend deep. Adam can break away and play on the shoulder of the defence, along the offside line, but when he’s through on goal, he scores.
“Scott (Wharton) was steady today and he did the job required of him. I think the test for the likes of Scott is the day he, or any other young centre-back we have, is when they come up against two strikers. A lot of modern-day teams play with one up top, most commonly in a 4-2-3-1, but a lot recently are going into a 3-5-2 and a lot of teams are playing against us with two strikers, which turns the centre-half’s job into one of communication, sometimes, rather than a ‘fill your hole’, ‘play against the one striker’, ‘see him coming’, ‘fill that channel’, ‘win some headers’, etcetera, kind of job. I thought Scott stood up really well today and his distribution was more than good enough and I was pleased with him, overall, because it was an area where, in our minds ahead of this game where we needed Scott to deal with (Lyndon) Dykes, even though I knew that (Darragh) Lenihan could do the job. I thought that defensive partnership combined pretty well, today.
“I hope that we can have a few back by the end of the international break. Obviously, Corry’s hamstring injury means he’s another that’s going to be sidelined, which is a shame for him because I know he has some crucial games with Northern Ireland that he’s now going to have to miss. I would hope that Amari’i Bell, Barry Douglas and Daniel Ayala, just to name a few, will be back to add to the returns of Kaminski, Johnson and Armstrong. It was good to have Kaminski back, even though playing him was a bit of a gamble. He was so desperate to play that he made my decision easy and it looks like he’s come out of today unscathed, so playing him ultimately proved to be the right decision.”
